The SCO lawsuit as dark comedy

The difference is that SCO isn't presenting itself as hard-bitten "wide boys" hinting broadly about vandalism and arson, but as Armani-wearing voracious predators, apparently wildly threatening to loose a plague of intellectual property lawyers.

This might be chilling for Linux vendors and the Linux community, except that, as the story begins to play out in the online press and the Court, SCO is beginning to look like the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

SCO's ridiculous lawsuit against IBM would be seen as the stuff of high comedy, if there weren't some important issues at stake: things like the integrity of the GNU software toolchain and the Linux kernel itself, the strength of the GPL license in protecting most Free/Open Source (FOSS) software from proprietary attacks, and indeed the viability of all Free/Open Source software as alternatives to closed-source enslavement.

Based upon its public statements, one might wonder if SCO's executives are: (a) uninformed about their own software, (b) incompetent to assess their own legal claims, (c) absent-mindedly forgetting what they've already said, when it suits the occasion, or (d) some or all of the above, depending on who's talking that day.

On the one hand, we have SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride quoted in this May 1st article at C|Net saying: "We're finding... cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code." Also, "We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code -- but it was." He says there's infringing code in the Linux kernel!

This is curious, since just a few days earlier, SCO Group VP Chris Sontag said something entirely different in an interview with MozillaQuest: "We're not talking about the Linux kernel that Linus and others have helped develop. We're talking about what's on the periphery of the Linux kernel."

Quite a difference here. The question now is: Which is it, SCO Group?

These statements to the press simply make SCO look stupid, incompetent, economical with the verite, or all of the above. What's David Boies doing with such bozos?

Surely SCO could have just filed its lawsuit and then shut up, waiting for its day in Court. Most companies involved in commercial litigation over Intellectual Property (IP) or other claims follow the normal course of action, which is to let their lawyers do their arguing in Court, and not making any statements in the public media. That would be normal, but SCO hasn't taken that approach. One must wonder why it's doing it.

One theory is that SCO Group doesn't really care whether it wins a case against IBM or not, but instead hopes to extract some licensing revenues from smaller Linux distributions and customers. Well, maybe.

Another theory is that Canopy Group, venture capitalist majority owners of SCO Group, just want a bump in the stock price so it can sell out to naive stock speculators at a premium. There might be something to it, though they mustn't have told David Bioes, as he couldn't have filed.

As an attorney acquaintance explained, a lawyer can't file a civil case unless he or she believes it has merit. But, maybe SCO got absent minded when it talked to its own lawyers, too....

This is only going to get better. There's more to report including IBM's Answer to SCO Group's Complaint and attorneys' comments, coming up. µ