First of all, why are financial analysts swaying your opinion on a LEGAL case? There is plenty of existing legal analysis of the case, you are ignoring *all* of it? Your analysis is completely faulty; you mistake patent for copyright law. You cannot copyright an idea. You must be thinking of patents. But SCO's case is not about patents, except for the ones that IBM owns that SCO is infringing on. Furthermore many of the ideas that came from unix are published in the POSIX standard, as well as countless other books. We all (yes, open source enthusiasts also) do live in a world where you have the right to prove your ownership and that no one can take that away. But SCO hasn't proven anything yet. The Open Source community hasn't been saying "it's ok to steal". The open source community has been saying "hurry up and tell us so we can get rid of your code". The example they showed in vegas (from BSD anyway) was already written out because it wasn't good enough! Also, what are the examples that you have seen before of a big company stealing something and then opensourcing it? There's been examples of infringing code in linux before -- but these were resolved without court fights. Why doesn't SCO mitigate its damages? What is their compelling proof? They got fined in Germany for not proving anything!!!!!