Comments on SCO silliness

Well, SCO's response to Novell was basically "Contract rights to UNIX. We have those, that's all we have ever claimed to have, and that's all we are suing IBM about." Any allusions to copyright or patent rights are presumably the fault of journalists or other parties, and have nothing to do with SCO (Kind of hard to reconcile that with comments like those about suing Linus Torvalds for patent infringement, though). So, what _is_ this all about, then?

A lot of people seem to be coming out and saying "The new SCO management are clueless dickheads with no idea whatsoever". That's certainly one option. Then there's Bruce Perens' favoured conspiracy theory - that Microsoft's prompt license purchase was nothing short of payment to SCO for some nice juicy Linux FUD. Myself, I'm still inclined towards the "let's get ourselves bought out by IBM approach". Big Blue is probably going to be pretty pragmatic about the whole deal. Rather than letting this drag on, and possibly hamper their Linux operations (it's blatant FUD, but it's _effective_ FUD), they may still decide to acquire SCO outright and just make the problem go away. Throw in the threat to their AIX distribution license, and this scenario becomes more likely.

However it plays out, it's going to be interesting to watch. I'm already amused by the idea of Novell and IBM being the good guys.