What a bunch of muppets. As reported at the BBC reasonably accurately for once, albeit with not much detail, a web hosting company called EV1 Servers has decided to bow to pressure from SCO to buy “a license to use Linux which contains SCO’s intellectual property”, as SCO would say. EV1 claim to have done this “to indemnify their customers against legal action by SCO.”
This is quite clearly a very silly thing to do:
- SCO’s claims that some of its code has made its way into Linux are unproven and widely considered to be false;
- EV1 has said that it is doing this to “protect its customers from legal action by SCO”, yet EV1’s customers would not be liable in any case, it would be EV1, but …;
- EV1 has a contract with Red Hat to supply and support Red Hat Linux, which EV1 then allows its customers to make use of. Red Hat has already made it known that it will indemnify any of its paying customers against possible future legal action from SCO.
Which all makes EV1’s paying SCO license fees rather fishy. One could envisage any number of conspiracy theories. Microsoft paying EV1 to give SCO money, so as to legitimize SCO’s claims thus discrediting Linux? SCO themselves doing the same thing? Who knows …
What I’m interested to know is – what does it say on these licenses? What is it that EV1 think they have ‘bought’? “This license entitles the holder to not be sued by SCO should it ever be found that SCO’s code is in Linux, which we claim it is, but we’re not telling you which code …” … ??
One thing’s for sure, though – EV1 won’t see that money again. When SCO lose their court case with IBM, which they undoubtedly will, there will be no money left in their kitty to pay out damages/refunds to anyone who was stupid enough to buy one of their vacuous licenses.
And there’s discussion on Slashdot as usual …