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A friend of mine faxed me a copy of Red Hat's complaint against SCO
filed at Delaware Federal District Court today. I am sure this
document will soon be readily available on the web if not already so.<br>
<br>
Red Hat's Complaint contains a very concise summary of the history of
Linux and GPL. In addition to a plead for a "declaratory judgement"
(asking the Court to declare that Linux does not infringe any of SCO's
intellectual property rights so we can all get on with our businesses),
Red Hat also claims that SCO violated Delaware's Deceptive Trade
Practice Act because SCO's action has "<i><b>Disparaged the goods,
services, or business of another by false or misleading representation
of fact".</b></i><br>
<br>
The significance of Red Hat's DTPA claim, of course, is that it will
entitle Red Hat for treble damages as well as recovery of attorney's
fees when Red Hat wins the case in court. At the present time, Red Hat
has not named SCO's holding company, The Canopy Group, as a
co-defendent. But this is believed to be simply a matter of strategy,
Red Hat can always amend its Complaint to add other defendents when
there is evidence justifying so.<br>
<br>
Since this subject will be extensively discussed in the Linux as well
as the legal communities, I will not post any further comment, but just
to mention that Hawaii has a similar disparaging-type deceptive trade
practice provision (Uniform Deceptive Trade Practice Act Section
481A-3(8)). I doubt SCO has caused any actual damage, but if it does,
we may expect an explosion of law suits similar to Red Hat's, against
SCO and perhaps those deeper pockets behind this shamelessly outrageous
and fradulent activity.<br>
<br>
Wayne<br>
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