This is wonderful moronic lawyer behavior. Perhaps if you work at SCO, you have to eat out of lead bowls and drink hot coffee from unglazed lead coffee mugs? Either that or this is some weird, but less potential version of Steve Job's reality distortion field gone bad - the way milk left outside the fridge does. Yes, Federal law allows you the EXTRA right to make one backup copy as per fair use. However, the GPL is not a copyright, it's a license agreement that gives the user extra rights, by virtue of the author's good will. So the author maintains his copyright, but allows the user to do the copying and distributing - the end user is almost acting as the copyright holder's agent. If the court rules that the GPL is invalid (i.e. clueless jury or judge) then all shrink wrap licenses are null and void also, and I don't think Billy Gates would like that very much, so in an odd turn of events, he'll be on the side of GPL come time for appeals! Wouldn't that be sweet irony? Indeed. Like the article says: D'oh! No wonder SCO's SCummy executives dumped their stock.... I would have expected them to claim that the Caldera employee who let Unix(tm) source out the door did so illegally, and therefore the GPL can't apply to that source, and that they still own rights to it, but it's doubtful they could prove such a thing. I believe the right and proper course of action is to give SCO a taste of their own shit, and have every linux user and every linux company file an INDIVIDUAL court case against SCO and NOT turn it into a class action suit (if it were possible). That would stretch SCO's lawyers very think to the point where they couldn't show up in court to defend themselves, and thus automatically loose. * * But(!) I don't play a lawyer on TV, and I'm a very bad actor, so consult a real lawyer, or a real actor, blah, blah, blah. I think Stan Kelly-Bootle's Devil's DP Dictonary needs the word Darl added to it, with the definition of: litigious asshole, who ironically couldn't find his own asshole if it were on his forehead and he looked straight on into a mirror during broad daylight. But, that would be demeaning to assholes. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of /|\ \|/ :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\ <--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech. \/|\/ /|\ :Found to date: 0. Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD. \|/ + v + : The look on Sadam's face - priceless! --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Jim Choate wrote:
I like the ed's comments at the end.