What on earth does Linux have to do with a car company??
Read the article, both autozone and dc use Linux =P. Hence the suing.
Since they couldnt target individual users of Linux they are now targetting corporates =P.
This is unprecidented. When Ford released the faulty Pinto, were individual car dealerships sued? How about users? When the ford bronco was found to be horribly unsafe, were the drivers of these vehicles thrown in the slammer? When MS released the illegal MS-DOS 6.1, which had dblspace, a program which was largely stolen from stac software, the creator of the imho superior stacker software, was stac software allowed to head out and sue all the users of DOS 6.1?
NO! If that's the case, why the hell can sco sue all linux users for infringement allegedly done by only IBM?
It's a conspiracy, etc., etc.
About the attacks:
There site has gone down several times, at a few of those times people called the company and employees admitted that the servers were down for maintanance. But all the while they played the victim of a DDOS attack. Some of the attacks may have been real, it's hard to tell.
About suing end users:
Copyright law governs copying, not usage (that's what licenses are for). They're copy-rights not use-rights. You'd have to be copying/distributing Linux to be violating SCO alleged IP in Linux. When confronted with this, Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) said that most users do copy it. So there you have it everybody, that's SCO's theory for how "the GPL transfers liability to the end user".
Just in case somebody here doesn't already know,
Groklaw is a site run by a paralegal doing lots of research and analysis countering everything SCO says/does. It's basically the unofficial open source anti-SCO headquarters and news site. Linus Torvalds himself has actually sibmitted an article debunking one of SCO's claims.
The only reason SCO's still foaming at the mouth is because they have Microsoft's financial backing. Everything out of SCO's lizard lips is full of BS though, and everyone with half a shred of intelligence knows it. This is a classic example of how money can take the place of intelligence, especially when your competitors have outshone you hundreds of times over. I relate this to a little kid who invents wild lies about his classmates when he consistently loses at checkers, and tattles to his teacher with these lies.
EDIT: As a side note to all of this...I was reading related articles on cnet and I came to one huge realization...IBM really has a killer hand in this situation. With Linux starting to gain major ground in Europe and Asia, it is very possible that IBM might just be able to pull off returning to the big picture in terms of software development, rather than just kicking themselves in the ass for not adapting to the pending changes (I'm referring to the time when the 80386 was developed and how IBM insisted on continuing to support the 80286 while Microsoft moved on to the new processor). Maybe this is redemption, long overdue. In any event, it will be quite interesting to see what IBM does in the next five years. I think Microsoft has coded itself into a corner which it cannot escape from, so they're going to play shadow man and let their puppet companies (like SCO) do the grunt work. Let's face it...Microsoft isn't supporting SCO because they like Linux.
