"As anything becomes more popular in an industry, it's going to open itself up to and become more of a potential target to holders of intellectual property," McDermott, Will & Emery's Ferguson said. "The Linux situation is a prime example of that."-- Brian Ferguson, 2003-02-11

"Bringing a person like Mr. Boies on board is certainly an indication that they plan to take this very seriously,"-- Brian Ferguson, 2003-02-11

"I think they want to generate more revenue through IP licensing. But it would be insanity for SCO to try and say: 'We hold IP on every Unix-like operating system which has ever shipped and is in use right now,'"-- Nat Friedman, 2003-02-11

"Eventually there's going to be some court cases interpreting the GPL itself," Kelly said. "But to date, there have been no decisions at all interpreting it or what it's supposed to mean ... or interpreting these ambiguities. And that's causing a good bit of uncertainty."-- Brian Kelly, 2003-02-11

"It's hard to see that happening in any big fashion. But it's certainly a risk with any open source project, because you don't know where all the contributions are coming from and it's possible that any individual contributor could have misappropriated that code or contribution from somewhere else," Kelly said.-- Brian Kelly, 2003-02-11

"We have a clear chain of custody for that (GNU) software so we're quite immune to those kinds of claims. The Linux kernel, because of the way it was developed, and because its developers didn't feel that what the (FSF) did was the right approach, have left themselves open to that kind of attack" from opportunistic bounty hunters, he said. However, he feels confident that the Linux kernel copyrights are all in order.-- Bradley Kuhn, 2003-02-11

"You can be certain that IBM and some of the larger companies will fight tooth and nail if they are approached on this, and they certainly have the legal army to do that. A company the size of IBM will come out with all cannons blazing," McDermott, Will & Emery's Lupo said.-- Ray Lupo, 2003-02-11

"There's a lot of big money and big guns who are going to find it in their selfish corporate interest to line up with the open source hackers," Raymond said. "I predict that if SCO attempts to levy patents or seek restraining orders against any of the Linux distributions, there will be a mob with pitchforks and torches at its door."-- Eric S. Raymond, 2003-02-11

"This is just the beginning; there's going to be a lot more of this,"

[...] "What surprises me is that I thought the first assault would come from Microsoft. I didn't expect it would be some of our guys who would go over to the dark side," Raymond said, referring to the fact that SCO also sells Linux software.-- Eric S. Raymond, 2003-02-11

"I wish we could just say we know everything, but we're dealing with such a large problem with many areas and complexities that we can't say 'this is it' and be done -- I wish we could," he said. "I can empathize with the concerns of [the Linux community], but we don't know all the answers to what may or may not be of issue," as SCO assess its intellectual property.

[...] "We want to see Linux succeed and grow," he said. "But we also have a significant amount of intellectual property in Unix, and in a number of cases we've seen so far, there's been some inappropriate use of our Unix technology."-- Chris Sontag, 2003-02-11

"If the Linux community is really going to continue to grow, we can't keep ignoring this problem of intellectual property violations. We need to address it head on,"-- Chris Sontag, 2003-02-11

"Many have commented that the GPL is very ambiguous and not very specific, leaving many things up in the air that could be potentially interpreted in many different ways, and I would agree with those characterizations," Sontag said.

This vagueness, he said, "can be problematic in cases when companies want to make contributions of certain things and maintain their intellectual property on other things and hold some things in reserve. The GPL in some cases can be problematic as to how you go about sorting that out."-- Chris Sontag, 2003-02-11