[ILUG] ``SCO awarded honorary Darwin award''

[Brian Foster]

Good Morning Silicon Valley
 Published: Tuesday August 17, 2004

   SCO awarded honorary Darwin award
      By John Paczkowski

 If you've sued a company for illegally releasing portions
 of your operating system code to the public, it's
 probably unwise to freely distribute "public" versions of
 that same code while your case is being heard in the
 courts.  In fact, it's sheer folly.  Yet that's exactly
 what SCO appears to have done.  In a motion for partial
 summary judgment of some of the claims made against it by
 SCO, IBM charges that SCO has distributed products that
 contain allegedly infringing code, as recently as two
 weeks ago.  "Although SCO claims to have 'discontinued'
 distributing any products containing the source code it
 claims IBM improperly disclosed, SCO continued to do so
 after it filed this lawsuit," IBM explains in its motion.
 "For example, SCO released its 'SCO Linux Server 4.0 for
 the Itanium Processor Family' product on April 14, 2003,
 after SCO filed its original complaint.  ...  In addition,
 SCO continued to make the Linux 2.4 kernel available for
 download from its Web site well after it commenced this
 lawsuit.  This code was still available off SCO's Web site
 as recently as August 4, 2004.  Given SCO's extensive
 promotion and sale of Linux, and of the specific code
 contributed by IBM therein, for years prior to commencing
 this suit against IBM, SCO has waived any right to claims
 that IBM breached its contracts by disclosing such code."
 And so it appears that SCO's legal charade is coming to
 an end.  Certainly, IBM's motion will be extraordinarily
 difficult to dispute.  It's only a matter of time now.
[ ... ]
  Good Morning Silicon Valley is written and edited with
  the able assistance of John Murrell.

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