Bonafide Financial Analysis of SCO...

Decatur Jones has given PJ at Groklaw permission to publish their recent analysis of SCO's financial future. Here's a great excerpt that puts recent news in perspective in a clear, cogent manner:

"Our major concern has still not been addressed

We believe SCOs latest claim will have limited impact on end-users
contemplating purchase of a SCOSource license. Recall that these are
the licenses that allow end-users to use Linux without fear of
litigation for potential violation of SCOs intellectual property
rights. One of our ongoing criticisms of SCO is that they have
provided little clear evidence of copyright infringement. If
IP-violations do exist then we believe SCO will need to provide more
convincing evidence or produce a court victory to win significant
IP-related licensing revenue. As we see it, the fact that only three
to four customers have signed up to date supports this assertion.

New claims provide greater specificity

Yesterday in conjunction with its earnings release, SCO announced that
it would send notice to 6000 Unix licensees of potential Linux
infringement issues and ask for certification from the various
licensees that they were protecting SCOs intellectual property. The
letters also contained a list of 65 files that SCO claimed were in
Linux and infringed their copyrights.

...but still not the clear-cut enough to win end-users

The files listed were generally what are known as header files that
define certain variables. For example, a problem with a input/output
device like a mouse might produce an error called EIO for Input-Output
Error. This in itself is not proprietary. What SCO is claiming is
proprietary is assigning EIO as error code 4. The assignment of
certain values to variables is what allows interoperability between
different software programs so changing these codes could be
burdensome. Whether or not SCO can claim EIO=4 as proprietary is
disputed."

Posted by joebeone at Diciembre 24, 2003 03:19 PM