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[LUG] Open source group files complaint against SCO



Open Source Victoria today filed a complaint with the Australian Competition 
and Consumer Commission, asking it to investigate SCO's activities in light 
of "unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats for money" against 
possibly hundreds of thousands of Australians. 
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/23/1058853121030.html

More from same page:
Zymaris said SCO's recent registration of copyright to the legacy Unix System 
V source code, on which SCO already claims copyright, in no way affected 
Linux. "Copyright registration is a simple filing procedure which merely 
formally registers a claim and does not in any way constitute proof of 
ownership," he said. 

"SCO has yet to prove its claims of the existence of any disputed source in 
the Linux codebase. Linux was written from scratch by a global community of 
free software volunteers and IT corporations. 

"We believe that SCO will find it extremely difficult to cement their claims 
in court, and until they do, they are spreading fear to extract money from 
innocent users. We believe this is unethical and possibly illegal in 
Australia." 

Zymaris said that even if SCO could show that any Unix System V source code 
was present in the Linux kernel (and was not intentionally contributed by 
SCO's own staff) SCO could not absolve itself as for the past few months, it 
had been publishing all such code publicly under the GNU Public License. 

From the slashdot story:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72136&cid=6509345
A sign that clearly shows how successful the legal action against SCO Germany 
was is SCO Germany's website [www.sco.de].

And I can tell you, SCO is going to get even more big problems with the 
assertion that SCO will license Linux to companies. Since SCO doesn't own the 
complete copyright to Linux, licensing it under a different license than the 
GPL and earning money with these licenses is a crime in Germany and Europe. 
This can get the CEO of SCO Germany 2 years in prison.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72136&cid=6509749



-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.codehelp.co.uk
http://www.dclug.org.uk

http://slashdot.org/~codehelp

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