OSCON: SCO vs IBM panel discussion

After hearing much hype and drama in the press about the SCO vs IBM lawsuit, it was refreshing to hear more down to earth prespectives from Bradley Kuhn (Free Software Foundation), Alan Nugent (Novell), and attorney Lawrence Rosen (Open Source Initiative). The panel was moderated by Chris DiBona (of Slashdot fame).

Larry Rosen, an attorney who is familar with open source legal issues had a few interesting points to offer:

• Contrary to the misleading panel title (IP Wars: SCO vs Linux) this lawsuit is not an intellectual property lawsuit -- it's a contract dispute lawsuit since the key issue lies in the interpretation of the contract between IBM and SCO.
• The lawsuit must prove that SCO was harmed by IBM's actions. Was SCO harmed in this case? Larry believes that this is not the case and will be difficult to prove in court.
• On how people should regard this case: "People ought to chill out. There is a lot of premature worry." Chances that SCO is going to win this suit are slim. IBM easily disputed nearly all the facts alleged in the lawsuit (except the part that IBM is a New York corporation, which is true).
• The letters that SCO sent out informing corporate Linux users of the SCO vs IBM lawsuit mean nothing and only the outcome of the lawsuit will determine the real effects. The letters were merely sent out to create FUD.

Brad Kuhn from the FSF thought that: "The goal [of this lawsuit] is to make the GPL and Linux look bad." I couldn't agree more -- there seems to be little other merit in the suit.

Along the same lines, it was discussed that Microsoft licensed the IP from SCO after the case was filed, thus infusing SCO with much needed cash for pushing this lawsuit. But, what on earth is Microsoft going to do with this IP? Microsoft has not embraced UNIX since back in the XENIX days and even that was tenous at best.

Furthermore, one of the panelists remarked that Linus Torvalds prefers to accept patches only from people he knows, and that the Linux kernel is generally considered one of the harder projects to get a patch accepted. So, how could the offending code have made it into the Linux kernel?

I have a hard time thinking that someone close enough to Linus would be dumb enough to jeopardize Linux by including proprietary code. Often times the Linux kernel hackers mock other flavors of UNIX which makes it seem unlikely that the developers would even be tempted to include proprietary code.

We will see how this plays out -- Larry pointed out that the suit had been moved from a state court into a federal court and that federal judges didn't want cases lingering for too long. He didn't think that the case is significant enough to take a long time to resolve -- 1 to 2 years by his judgement.

Finally, it doesn't sound like the FUD attack that SCO planned is working out. Internet Week reports that "SCO's Linux lawsuit and threats seem to be having little affect on IT managers except to make them angry."

Do you think the SCO suit amounts to anything more than FUD?