SCO v. IBM

Not too much time for realpolitik today, but rather, some open source politics. I'll try to find a good primer later tonight for the entire SCO controversy (I always post that "later" b.s. and never come through). There's plenty of revealing info to be found on groklaw. Today's big deal was the Motion for Partial Summary Judgment on IBM's Counterclaim for Copyright Infringement. The redacted memorandum is pretty interesting, using SCO's own affirmative defenses (one of which is that the GPL is invalid) against it. As it turns out, SCO copied verbatim over 750,000 lines of copyrighted code from IBM (which is legal under the GPL), but redistributed it for profit (which is not legal and therefore terminates the GPL).

Bottom line - SCO is REALLY screwed at this point...they really don't have much of a legal case to work with, and this could turn into a solid test case for GPL, since there is relatively little case law regarding this type of public license. More info on the recent PSJ Motion here.

Oh and here is the Redacted Memorandum in Support.