SCO vs. the world

One of the nice things about orga­niz­ing events filled with geeks is the fact that I get to hang out with peo­ple that are smarter than me. The dis­cus­sion on Tues­day cov­ered a wide num­ber of sub­jects but most of the fas­ci­na­tion came from what to do with SCO. For those not famil­iar with the bat­tle, SCO is cur­rently suing IBM, Red­hat, and other Linux ven­dors, claim­ing that some of its code is present in the Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. Their claim is based on the con­cept that they did not autho­rize their code to be redis­trib­uted in such a fashion.

Going fur­ther, SCO is now try­ing to over­turn the GPL, the licens­ing scheme used by most of the open source com­mu­nity to share and redis­trib­ute code. As a result, they have essen­tially gone to war against the whole open source community.

One of the inter­est­ing sug­ges­tions that came up is the fact that, by say­ing that Open Source is theft, and that by say­ing Linux is theft, SCO is essen­tially defam­ing any per­son that uses or pro­motes Linux and/or open source product.

Based on this insight, it is pos­si­ble to look for­ward to a time when geeks might con­sider strik­ing back. Esti­mates on the installed base of open source/Linux users ranges from a few mil­lions to much higher num­bers. What if a lot of those users were to file defama­tion law­suits in their state. This is the con­cept of death by a thou­sand paper cuts: with thou­sands of cases built around defama­tion of char­ac­ter (“SCO said that I was a thief!”), SCO could find itself bat­tling on many fronts (let’s assume for a sec­ond that only 10 peo­ple in each state do file such a law­suit: That’s 500 lawsuits!)

As the dis­cus­sion shifted around that con­cept, sus­pi­cion was that SCO would then ask to con­sol­i­date those law­suit in a sin­gle one at the fed­eral level. At this point, it could be seen essen­tially as a class action law­suit. If a sin­gle set of firms were to rep­re­sent that class, we could be look­ing at a class of sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple. If all those peo­ple chipped in 10 dol­lars each to help defray the cost of the class action, the money raised to fight SCO could run in the mil­lions of dollars.

This could rep­re­sent a new chal­lenge for SCO, as they would now have to fight a heav­ily financed machine. I don’t know that much about the law but it seems there is the germ of an inter­est­ing idea here, one that could rede­fine the SCO fight.