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A SCOop

An interesting piece by Paul Murphy on the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit was published today in LinuxWorld. In a nutshell, Mr. Murphy believes that SCO has a pretty solid case against IBM for some of their Linux ports to midrange and mainframe computers because the group that worked on AIX, which held SCO licensed code, worked on the ports. However, despite the strong claim position by SCO against IBM on the mainframe ports, there doesn't seem to be any overlap to the mainstream Linux on Intel code. His conjecture is that IBM will reach a settlement with SCO and that will be that. He also has a very pragmatic view of Microsoft's involvement in the whole ordeal - basically, they probably had some potential liabilities and reaching an agreement with SCO on licensing was "business as usual". Of course, it probably wasn't a problem in Redmond that paying licensing fees might sew some confusion in the Linux camp ;-)