SCOX: 0.40 -0.04 (-9.48%) – The SCO Group, Inc.

Not that I was terribly worried myself, anyway.

Of course, with Novell owning the rights to Unix, there is the entire question of what they’ll do with that. Hopefully, they won’t be influenced by their “partnership” with Microsoft to use the Unix source code rights to do evil things, like try to trash Linux more with it. I should think that would not be in their best interests, anyway, since they themselves distribute a distribution of GNU/Linux systems. That does bring up an interesting point, though: if Novell owns the rights to Unix, perhaps it is in Linus Torvalds’ best interests to gather up all the contributors and get them to relicense their code under the GPLv3. Ditch the code written by people that cannot make the decision to move to GPLv3 for one reason or another (there are many people that have contributed to the Linux kernel under the terms of the GPLv2, for example, that are no longer living), and rewrite code with similar or identical functionality to be released under the terms of the GPLv3.

I think that things would be far better for the Linux kernel if Linus would’ve required that all copyright ownership be transferred to him if he accepted the code for inclusion in the kernel. That would avoid the large licensing mess, no matter what happened. Though, it would also require that there be a large amount of trust be placed in Torvalds’ for always doing The Right Thing™. I should think that he would, but who knows—there are many people and businesses in the world that have similar trust placed in them and they seem to not care about doing the wrong things to the wrong people. Two examples that come to mind are Brad Fitzpatrick and Six Apart, but of course those are just recent examples.