What SCO wants...

[John Chambers]

Seth comments:
|
| If IBM settles, it undermines the business case for open source, since
| MS salesmen can whisper, "who knows what *other* companies have had
| their IP misappropriated by Linux...."

If you have a chance to get into such whispering campaigns, you might
get  the  more  sensible  ones to listen to the salient point:  Since
linux's code has been open and published on  the  Internet  from  the
start,  while  most  companies'  code  is  kept secret, it's far more
likely that any shared code was stolen from linux.

It's much easier to plagiarize something that has been published than
it is to plagiarize something that is kept secret. There have already
been a lot of comments from people who understand  this  and  suspect
that SCO is the thief.

There is a long history of publishers taking someone else's work  and
publishing it as their own. This is especially common with texts that
are public domain, but it can happen with any  publication.   It's  a
cheap source of income if you can get away with it.