From: Amelia A Lewis [mailto:amyzing@[...].com]

> IBM is accused of violating an NDA, and allowing code
> to escape from its own developers into Linux.

Ok.  Note that SCO has not said they won't sue others. 
There may be more to this than the NDA.

> Should it be shown that there is SCO code in Linux, Linus and company will
> remove it.  

Ok. It is a cost issue for the Linux users and their customers, and 
a risk to manage for companies to consider when enabling or allowing 
their employees to work on open source.  They need to vette the 
project and the employees, so it is another cost item to add to 
participation in open source and a risk to be managed.

> >competitors they think they are de-opting.  The second 
> >word in IP is Property.

> Right.  Referring to certain privileges awarded by the state, amounting to
> monopoly in a restricted area, in order to encourage the sharing of
> information. 

Yes.  It is a licensing right.  Note that this also encourages
cross-licensing 
agreements and that is a strong incentive to innovate.

> And all of this is really old news already, so why harp on it?  FUDding
> Mozilla on the basis of SCO FUD is enormously irritating, but not much
else. 

It was new news to me.  Usually when one of these pops up, this list or 
another will make note of it.  This time, things stayed rather quiet. 
When I looked at Google, I picked up a four month old article, yes, 
and considering how Google indexes, things were rather quiet.  Interesting. 
Google tells one what people are talking about and what they aren't. 
So it appears that no one is harping.  It does look like some usually 
vocal folks are irritable, that's true.

> Mozilla's pockets just got a lot shallower the
> other day, so it isn't particularly likely that a failing browser company
> would make a last bid for share price and existence by feeding a swarm of
> attack lawyers on the blood of the browser.

True.  There is little money to be made litigating the poor.  On the 
other hand, no one knows who put what from where inside Moz or Linux 
until they look.  For the customer of an IBM or Linux, that's a risk. 
It is less of a risk for a buyer of a product owned outright by the 
company that sells it with all licensing and cross-licensing items 
intact.

Before you miss the big picture here, the cross-licensing patterns 
emerging are noteworthy.  They protect, they aggregate, and they 
incentivize innovation without loss of licensing rights.

len

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