Not looking at all good for SCO.

As anyone with a vaguely technical streak will know, SCO have been trying to levy license fees on GNU/Linux users on the basis of alleged intellectual property (IP) infringement in the Linux kernel - and, by smearing the reputation of GNU/Linux, to effectively destroy GNU/Linux as a viable business proposition.

Some companies have paid up as an insurance policy - in case the current SCO vs. foo cases went SCO's way.

Today, we see the emergence of an email that may well leave the SCOsource licensees - who paid SCO a fair amount of money - looking very very foolish.

SCO employed people to check for possible IP violations; and, after a couple of months, the people on the task reported that they couldn't find any; and yes, they were pretty certain about that.

("At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.")

And four months after this, SCO announced an offensive on GNU/Linux users based on the assertion that the Linux kernel contained SCO IP; and have launched a number of lawsuits on that and related matters.

Given that SCO is, in technical terms, somewhat moribund, the only thing really keeping the investors happy is the prospect of riches to come from licensing of SCO's alleged IP.

As such, the revelation that a) one of their major IP claims is false and b) they knew it to be false before they started getting litigious could do interesting things to the credibility of SCO and its lawsuits.

What do you call a company that elicits money from a third party based on claims it knows to be untrue?

G.