Well given the credibility of each, Torvalds is telling the truth. Why would he lie, really? He started this as a hobby, not to make money and he's still not asking for money for Linux. That's the one reason I'll believe Torvalds over a greedy CEO who is about as smart as a pebble at the bottom of Salt Lake.

If you think at how SCO is approaching this situation, failing company, owns Unix, hey lets try to get something for nothing and everytime the community proves us wrong on the small amount of proof we think we have, we have to come up with a different way so we don't look as stupid as before.

My two cents...

PS. If no one has read the actual transcripts from the first court appearance where IBM won so where SCO has to show the fraud that was being committed, the IBM lawyers make the SCO lawyer who was actually Darl's brother look like a total fool. The guy couldn't even keep on track about the case, instead trying to bring up irrelevant stories that don't even pertain to the case they are suing IBM for. Probably one reason the Judge told SCO, show us the proof that IBM is committing fraud as IBM can't just assume what they are doing wrong and show it to SCO instead. SCO will die... and hopefully soon. I'll be watching the stock plummit to literall dust in the wind after the judge throws this out.

I'll leave it at the fact that SCO has an expert which is about to tell the courts that Linus didn't write certain pieces of code. Linus says he did, and has proof of it, and I'd say Linus.. is THE expert on Linus.
As for the rest, I don't think much code was taken, and if it was it was by mistake. Even if code was taken, it'll be replaced withthing 2 days, and that's the end of that.
Really.. Who cares who wins? It makes no difference except to SCOs and IBMs bottom lines.

Actually it would probably pave the way for SCO to charge all linux users licensing fees, at least in terms of establishing a legal precedent. They also have hinted at going after freeBSD, so unless you plan on installing BeOS or something, I think pretty much everyone at this site has a vested interest in the outcome of this case.

I read somewhere that part of the code that SCO is claiming as it's own originally came from BSD. All SCO did was delete the parts that attributed it to Berekely and put their own name in.

SCO are going down - if they can't get their story straight, if the lawyer can't stay on track, the Judge will throw the case out.

Start offloading that SCO stock now.

SCO is definetely gonna' land on their ass big time.

And would u believe that the lawyer fighting for SCO's tall claims is in a sense, McBride's brother, and not a very established lawyer.

My guess is Darl "it's someone else's problem to deal with my non sequiturs" McBride.

How?
It's GPLed code. Linus can take all the current code from Linux, say.. he's giving up on Linux, and starting a new OS with it.. called.. umm.. Linux.
Problem solved. Even barring this extreme measure, since SCO doesn't have rights to any of the code they won't be able to prove is theirs, once we remove all of theirs they have no more legal claims. Sure.. they can try to sue IBM for loss of revenue (which they are), but they can't sue Linux users.
Just because in a huge amount of code there are a few lines of copyrighted code (and we haven't established that), doesn't mean the person which holds the rights to those few lines, now has rights over all of it.

Part of there claim is that the GPL is invalid as a license. They also claim that there is widespread copyright infringement in the Linux source code that is so rampant and integral, that simply deleting a few lines of code won't fix the problem. And because we as Linux users have benefited (and are benefiting) from that infringed intellectual property, we owe them compensation as does IBM for contributing that stolen IP to Linux.

Of course I think they're full of it and hope that they get crusified by IBMs lawyers, but that's what they're trying to claim.

Well I'm not worried about if SCO does win, they can charge everyone license fees cause when it all boils down to it, if IBM did place code in the kernel, well, that's not my fault or problem, that's IBM's and they need to deal with it.

Like I've stated many times before, if Ford sent me a letter saying I have to pay them $500 bucks to drive my car cause GM stole a patented part and placed it in there, well, sue GM, its not my fault and I'm protected under consumer rights.

Just like Linux, everytime I downloaded it I was downloading it under the GPL. If some company placed some other companies code in it, well again, deal with them cause you won't win your case in court with me or any other company smart enough to say, no, I'm not paying you.

My two cents.

But Trickykid, the GPL has yet to be tested in court, should SCO bluff their way enough it may be tested in this particular case.

Thing is, if you download a copy, don't register or pay for it, how will anyone know who is a Linux user or not? Even checking this forum for wrongdoers won't help since I, for example, have been without Linux for a month. <woe is me>

Equally, even Microsoft (who are famously litigious) would never dream of suing individual users since that's the sort of thing that bites back. Hypothetically, in a wierd parallel universe where SCO's claims are believed, if SCO wins and we become individually liable then so do they. Every time an exploit is found, we would all just sue SCO.

Very nasty and very pointless. Especially, as I pointed out above, SCO appear to have stolen BSD code and changed the names on it - in clear violation of already tested legislation. So they are suing because IBM stole some code from a proprietary product which was already stolen from an open source product and gave it to an open source product. Truth often is stranger than fiction.

The GPL is based around copyright principles well defined in US law, and I beleive in parts of the constitution too. It's protected as a licence, from what I've read from groklaw.

Now... even if the GPL is invalidated, who gets the code and with what licence?
You can't take all those hours of work developers had and give them to SCO, that's blatantly illegal. Worst case scenario, is that we loose the GPL (which is stupid), and we have to pick a new licence.

Well, first of all I think there is a .0001% chance that SCO is going to prove to the Government and World that the GPL is invalid form of license. The government already recognizes and uses it themselves. I can create any program I want and slap any License under my own terms which is totally applicable by law in most cases, if the person is agreeing with it when either buying or downloading.
Its the great thing about licenses that really gives true power to the person handing it out and the recipient that it agrees to it. If they don't, its void and the party that doesn't agree doesn't use the software, etc in question.

But you have to think, SCO has the Linux expert to testify against Linus. Darl must be out of his mind and I would love to see the person that is this so-called expert who is more knowledgeable than Linus himself.

Also if they tried to go after the GPL, well, it would probably be brought up that they use to create and distribute programs/apps under it as well.

This whole thing is a case of a dying company which the CEO promised the shareholders a turnaround, he couldn't do it and now he's desperate.

Cheers.

Based on Darl's choice of lawyer, his expert is probably his 15 year old nephew! Trickykid - get Jeremy to monitor board usage during the trial. If we get a lot of questions like "can anyone explain what line 55 of the kernel source code is all about?" we'll know that SCO is trying to rope us in to help their case.

Hehe.. Yeah for anyone who read the transcript from round 1 where Darl's brother was arguing the case, if I were a SCO shareholder, I'd already be dumping my stock and running to Mexico or somewhere else.