Comment of the Day - January 4, 2006 - Why SCOX got another $10M

You'll have to go to places like Groklaw and lamlaw and tuxrocks to get a feel for some of the shenanigans. Since SCOX's stock is mostly held by just a few people, they may never be called to account. They are the majority stock holders.

Al Petrovsky seems to be the outside stockholder who asks the most questions.

BayStar started asking question, and dumped their SCOX stock.

SCOX did distribute United Linux:
[HYPERLINK@ir.sco.com]




There are lots of documents at
[HYPERLINK@www.unitedlinux.com]


You will see that several of the technologies SCOX are claiming SuSE is ilegally distributing were distributed by SCOX in United Linux under the GPL. United Linux was based on SuSE Linux server edition.

SCOX distributed these things under the GPL. If SCOX/Caldera were an auto parts reseller, or a car manufacturer, I think that they could plead before the Judge that they were not familiar with things like computer source code and technology like that.

I do not believe that a company that is made up from the parts of a major Linux distributor, and a major Unix distributor can argue these things succesfully. If a major Linux company with several years experience in developing, distributing, and servicing Linux in industry does not know that source code contains copyrighted material they are most likely not telling the truth. If a publisher publishes a book or magazine that is a collection of other's copyrighted works, they are responsible for ensuring that they have permission to do so. If SCOX was publishing work they owned under the GPL, but didn't realize it, they only have themselves to blame. They should have done due dilligance.



Of course its most likely that they didn't own it in the first place, at least that's what Novell says.

-Sean