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Filed under: News, Open Source

One more nail in the coffin: Nasdaq delists SCO



After filing for Chapter 11 protection in September, The SCO Group has been delisted from the Nasdaq trading index. The companies ticker symbol, formerly SCOX is kaput, although the non-indexed SCOX.PK (PK stands for "pink sheet") remains.Groklaw has brilliantly juxtaposed today's press release with the 2003 release stating SCO's intent to sue IBM.

For the uninitiated, SCO, formerly known as Caldera Systems, was at one time one of the largest Linux distributors for the business environment. In 2003, the newly named SCO systems sued IBM for $1 billion dollars, claiming that IBM's Linux products used parts of UNIX (which SCO claimed to own the rights to), thus devaluing the SCO brand. The story is extremely sordid and complicated, this Wikipedia page has a pretty good assessment of the various controversies and Groklaw has covered the various lawsuits involving SCO since 2003.

In short, SCO tried to claim intellectual property ownership of various parts of source code they claimed to be part of the open-source Linux kernel (one of the more insane claims, that SCO owned UNIX was legally dismissed in August 2007, and the actual owner of the UNIX and UNIXWare code, Novell, was awarded damages). SCO then sued manufacturers of competing Linux distributions for various claims ranging from the usage of SCO owned source code, trade secret violations and anti-competitive practices. And this from a company who's most successful product was actually called, "OpenLinux."

Objectivity aside - we can't wait for these guys to finally be out of business for good.

[via Slashdot]

Filed under: Business, Linux, Microsoft

Microsoft has 'no immediate plans' to sue over Linux patent infringement claims

After Microsoft made the claim that Linux infringes on 235 of its patents, some folks became worried that the company might begin suing companies who use OSS. Even individual users have launched a 'Sue Me First' campaign, challenging the company to "put its lawyers where its mouth is" and prove the patent infringement.

Fortunately, Microsoft might not attempt to succeed where the SCO failed - at least not yet, anyway. In a statement emailed to ZDNet UK (though, strangely, posted on ZDNet Asia), a Microsoft spokesperson assured us that they would not litigate for now. "If we wanted to go down that road we could have done that three years ago" said Mr. Spokesperson. Funny - everyone was kinda under the impression that Microsoft has already been there, done that (for a recap on Microsoft's relationship with the SCO: MS was apparently funding the SCO's patent litigation efforts against IBM and their use of Linux).

The latest theory that takes into account this promise of no immediate litigation is that Microsoft is simply trying to scare OSS-slinging businesses into rethinking their position. Perhaps Redmond can convince these companies to rejoin the red, green, blue and yellow side of the fence - or at least into OSS that is sanctioned by Microsoft and/or Novell.

It's still early on in this whole patent infringement situation Microsoft has drudged up again, but the company surely isn't hurting for cash with which to fuel their army of lawyers. Still, during a time where Microsoft's reputation is likely at an all-time low and users are switching in record numbers to free and/or fruitier pastures, pulling a stunt like suing users or even businesses that pick up copies of software they haven't yet proven is infringing on anything isn't the brightest move they could make.

[via Slashdot]

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