"This shows one of the weaknesses of the open-source movement," said Mark Radcliffe, a copyright attorney with Gray Cary. "You're all dependent on trust. Unfortunately, a number of people involved in the process do not have a great degree of respect for intellectual property. It's fine if it's personal, but if you decide to implement that by saying 'I don't give a damn about this intellectual property,' everything that touches it is now screwed."-- Mark Radcliffe, 2003-05-01

"If they did enough due diligence to figure out there were concepts there, how the heck did they miss that there was actual code copying?"-- Mark Radcliffe, 2003-06-04

"If they had the rights to enforce the copyrights, how come that didn't show up in the IBM suit?" Radcliffe asked. "It's very weird they would bring a lawsuit on trade secret (misappropriation) and unfair competition and not put in copyrights and patents. Those are the strongest rights. Particularly with IBM, you don't go out and say, 'I'm not going to take the elephant-hunting rifle with me, I'm just going to take my .22-caliber.'"-- Mark Radcliffe, 2003-06-04

"I think that's a tough argument to make. The fact that distributing software with proprietary code in it turns it into open source--I think a court would have difficulty swallowing that one," he said. "This may be a test of the open-source license."-- Mark Radcliffe, 2003-06-11

"It's a very smart strategy, if it works," said Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with Gray Cary. "If the price is low enough, better to buy a certainty than get tangled in a murky war."-- Mark Radcliffe, 2003-07-21

"It shows a deep skepticism if not outright disdain for the SCO claims," Radcliffe said. "Or else they wouldn't be spending this amount of money."

In particular, the acquisition plan could indicate that IBM has faith in a provision that Radcliffe termed a "silver bullet" in the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement under which Novell sold Unix to SCO Group's predecessor. [...]

"Maybe (IBM) believes its silver bullet is actually a platinum bullet. If you spend a lot of money, you obviously have a lot of confidence in that part of the situation," Radcliffe said.-- Mark Radcliffe, 2003-11-06

"There will be a wave of a number of lawsuits on open source simply because it's become so ubiquitous," said panelist Mark Radcliffe, a partner at law firm Gray Cary.-- Mark Radcliffe, 2004-03-18

The loss doesn't set a precedent, but it does make it harder for SCO to pursue its overall case, said Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with Gray Cary. "The more that SCO is unsuccessful in its claims, the more it decreases their ability to go out and use the threat of litigation to obtain settlements," he said. "It diminishes their credibility."-- Mark Radcliffe, 2004-07-21