SCO: Without Fear and Without Research

There’s a traditional definition of a shyster: a lawyer who, when the law is against him, pounds on the facts; when the facts are against him, pounds
on the law; and when both the facts and the law are against him, pounds on the table. The SCO Group’s continuing attempts to increase its market value
at the expense of free software developers, distributors and users through outlandish legal theories and unsubstantiated factual claims show that the
old saying hasn’t lost its relevance.

Just The Facts

SCO continues to claim in public statements about its lawsuit against IBM that it can show infringement of its copyrights in Unix Sys V source code by
the free software operating system kernel called Linux. But on the one occasion when SCO has publicly shown what it claimed were examples of code from
Linux taken from Unix Sys V, its demonstration backfired, showing instead SCO’s cavalier attitude toward copyright law and its even greater sloppiness
at factual research.

On August 18, 2003, SCO’s CEO, Darl McBride, offered a slide presentation of supposed examples of infringing literal copying from Sys V to Linux at a
public speech in Las Vegas. Within hours the free software and open source communities had analyzed SCO’s supposed best evidence, and the results were
not encouraging for those investors and others who hope SCO knows what it is talking about.