On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Keith Mastin wrote:

I suspect that the basis of the core kernel code is strong enough to survive an unfavorable ruling. The question in my mind is, is the opensource community strong enough to survive the courtcase, winning or losing notwithstanding?

I think that it must be made CLEAR that the people being sued are not the GPL, not Linux, but the firm(s) who have introduced the supposed IP into the codebase, while breaking the GPL. Imho this scandal only tests whether the GPL will be enforced by the copyright and trademark owners of the GPL and of the Linux name against whoever put someone's IP into the codebase (if they put it there). The way I see it, the moment SCO officially puts down the offending code as evidence, and the code is found to be taken from someone (possibly from them) as opposed from the public domain (or BSD code), the people who wrote the code will have to be found, and then someone from FSF/GPL will have to serve them a GPL license violation writ immediately. *This* would test the GPL imho. And failure to do this would be a big mistake, as it would be a kind of abandoning of the license and its object (by not defending it). But, ianal. Meanwhile the FSF/GPL lawyers should have two such writs in a drawer, one for each of the involved firms, and be ready to pull the right one out and serve it immediately when needed. There is no question about whether OS will survive the test because the test is not about OS at all. It is about whether someone can get away with slander and FUD against the GPL and Linux, over, say 0.0001% of its code, and bring the house down over this. However, the intention of these people to drag the open source community through this lawsuit and associated fears is obvious, as is their intention to benefit from this precedent they are creating in the future. Peter -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml