The SCO Group, mostly known for suing IBM over the use of the Linux operating system, has recently been caught in violating the intellectual property rights of a different big company: Microsoft.
SCO Unixware 7.1.4 features the Open Source package mplayer. This player again used to feature support for playback of Windows Media files (WMV9) using Microsoft's proprietary codecs from Windows in an emulation layer. Thus, the win32codecs package, which belonged to mplayer, always came with the notice that one must be in possession of a genuine Windows license in order to be allowed to use them for playback.
On the other hand, the business isn't going very well for SCO. There are basically no profitable businesses, and there appears to be significant evidence that the claims that SCO announced against IBM, are mostly hot air. Novell researched deeper into their documents, discovering that the copyright to the Linux source code had never been sold to SCO, but was intentionally kept back for the case of a bankruptcy on behalf of SCO.
Which seems like an intellegible move in the light of the current development of SCO's shares. Never since March 13th has the SCO share fulfilled the criterium of being listed in the NASDAQ technology index, which is to be traded for more than US$ 1.-. If the company doesn't recover within 180 days, it will no longer be a NASDAQ company.
This doesn't come as a surprise. McBride has tried to make SCO some kind of Non-Producing Entity (NPE), which makes its money from intellectual property litigation. However, SCO is in a horribly bad shape for this kind of business, for several reasons:
So all in all, we have to wonder how long McReed in Wonderland is still going to be in business?
More details: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/88956, http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/89038