Regarding the SCO/IBM lawsuit (previous comments here and here), Robert X. Cringely has (as usual) a few interesting and well informed things to add. Quote:

Ashton was a macaw that lived in the lunch room at George Tate's software company, Ashton-Tate, home of dBase II, the first successful microcomputer database. There is a lot about that long-gone company that was unusual. There was the macaw, of course, which was named for the company, not the other way around. There was George Tate, himself, who died at his desk when he was only 40, but still managed to get married two weeks later (by proxy -- please explain that one to me). And later there was Ashton-Tate's copyright infringement lawsuit against Fox Software that pretty much destroyed the company when it became clear that Ashton-Tate didn't really own its database. NASA did, which meant that Fox had as much right to dBase as did Ashton-Tate. All this came to mind this week while I was thinking (still thinking -- this story seems to never end) about the SCO versus IBM lawsuit over bits of UNIX inside Linux. There is a lot SCO could learn from the experience of Ashton-Tate.