SCO's day of reckoning is now officially on the court's calendar. A judge has ordered the company, which so far has produced underwhelming evidence that IBM and others have infringed on its intellectual property, to produce a convincing smoking gun within 30 days. Fueling the soap opera in what appears to be half-publicity stunt and half pre-emptive strike on the day before the judge's findings were released, SCO CEO Darl McBride a published an open letter claiming that the GNU General Public License flies in the face of U.S. copyright law. But GPL advocates, including Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, are firing back, saying that McBride is confusing copyrights with patents and that there's nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says copyright owners must sell their work. In an e-mail interview, Open Source Initiative president Eric Raymond told ZDNet, "McBride isn't even scary any more; he has devolved into low comedy. Lawrence Lessig and [the Free Software Foundation's] Eben Moglen have refuted these wacky claims more than sufficiently, and I look forward to watching a judge toss them out." Meanwhile, McBride predicts it may be 18 months until SCO's suit against IBM goes to trial. Also, as many as 1,500 companies that have significant Linux systems are expected to have lawsuits filed against them by SCO in the next 90 days. Could yours be one of them? READ FULL STORY http://ct.com.com/click?q=76-vJt7InBZAQFIqhl4eJSU1rSdB65A