That Notorious Suit (Slightly OT)

[Daniel Carrera]

Hi Nathan,

> By "That Notorious Suit" I mean the ongoing drama between The Santa 
> Cruz Operation and International Business Machines over breach of 
> contract.

To be picky, "Santa Cruz Operation" != SCO.  Inspite of the apparent 
connection.

There was once a company called "Santa Cruz Operation".  They sold their 
OS division to a company called "Caldera".  Some time later, the "Santa 
Cruz Operation" changed its name to "Tarantella".  Some time after that, 
Caldera changed its name to "SCO".  Probably to confuse people.

The letters "SCO" do not stand for anything.


> Of course, the opportunity for the GnU General Public License to be 
> weighed, measured, and not found wanting is obvious, as much as the 
> potential consequences if it is found wanting.
> 
> The next logical step is to ask what flow-on effects a ruling in either 
> direction would have - or might have - on other OSI-approved licenses. 
> Not being familiar with U.S. law, I would appreciate any insights on 
> this point.

1) Within your scenario, you should also consider the *probability* of the 
GPL being found wanting.  This is an important point.  For example, I 
don't have a contingency plan in the event of meteor collisions.  But the 
probability of one happening is low enough that I'm not worried.

2) But to address your question anyways... I don't see how a problem with 
one license can have any effect on another, unless they are very similar.  
In the event that the GPL is deemed invalid, I would bet that the LGPL 
would also be deemed invalid, because they have some resemblance.  
However, the MIT, BSD and X11 licenses would be untouched.  They are 
entirely different.  Any grounds under which the GPL is deemed invalid 
would be very unlikely to apply to any of those.

Likewise, I would expect that a positive ruling would give credence to 
similar licenses, and have no effect on different licenses.

The BSD license is very simple.  I can't see it ever having a problem.  
Also, since it's very permisive, I can't imagine anyone being interested 
in questioning it.  Ditto for MIT, X11 and Apache licenses.


IANAL, but this is my take on this.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera    | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88
PhD grad student. | 
Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first
UMD, College Park | understand recursion".
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3