Of course SCO is going to loose this, I don’t see how they can expect to win. As has been said, it would do too much damage to the U.S. computer industry.

However, this whole thing does bring up a few questions for me:

-How can Linux be maintained in such a way that it never gets distributed with code that belongs to someone? I’m not totally familiar with the way open-source works, but certainly it isn’t right to use someone else’s code and distribute it for free if the origional creator didn't want it used that way.

-What exactly constitutes “copying code”? I’ve taken code I’ve written for a previous employer and used it on my current task simply to save time. True that I could have re-written it from scratch, but how would that have helped anything? I would have just ended up with the same thing and I can’t “unlearn” whatever techniques I used to write it in the first place. I’ve also taken other people’s code (from freely distributed examples) and modified it, incorporating it into my software. Most of the time when I’m finished what I have is totally different than what they provided. This isn’t a problem for me as these are all freeware pieces of code, but what if this was licensed code? To what extent does something have to change for it to become different? If I start a new file from scratch and type in everything myself, does that make it mine (clearly not)? Or if you were “inspired” by someone else’s code does that mean you are forever in their debt even if you improved upon their concept?

I realize that these are questions that have probably been answered, but as I’ve never done any open source development, I’m interested to know how these things are handled in the Linux world