twisty's Journal: SCO's double standards

To Red Hat's new charges, SCO has responded with their usual defensive doubletalk and unsubstantiated attacks.

SCO claims Red Hat could have proceded in "good faith talks." They can pretend that they themselves sued IBM, and wrote to groups of the Fortune 1000 businesses and another (probably overlapping in part) Global 500 companies, as being "good faith," but they clearly broke that when discussing their IBM suit by expanding their public allegations to the press to include Red Hat. Further, their requirement for an NDA contradicts any so-called "good faith" they pretend to extend.

On the offensive, they also call Linux "an unauthorized derivative of UNIX," although that defies historic record. They misstate: "Linux includes source code that is a verbatim copy of UNIX and carries with it no warranty or indemnification." Perhaps they meant to say Linux includes code copied verbatim from UNIX, but even if that were true as opposed to both being copied from a common (BSD) source, it doesn't mean they have propriety of said code. Their warranty comment was irrelevant to the suit, except that the GPL actually does assure owners that 'no one can take this from you.' That makes SCO's own action of continuing to publicly distribute Linux themselves, months after decrying such "betraying of secrets," all the more contradictory and self defeating.

Yet the most absurd part of their claims is that it is "a crime against SCO" to distribute Linux code, yet they themselves have been continuing to offer linux-source on their FTP for months after declaring it a violation. That's the dumbest approach to business I've ever heard.
Update 8-8-2003:Alright, so they're not entirely as dumb as they look. The RPMs on their site at present represent non-source patches for 2.4.19 kernels, and pre-2.4.13 kernels.