From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp@harmony.village.org (M. Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 17:56:39 -0600 (MDT) Subject: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate In-Reply-To: <20030529235027.GE20321@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20030529.063354.51702197.imp@bsdimp.com> <20030529235027.GE20321@wantadilla.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20030529.175639.34763729.imp@bsdimp.com> In message: <20030529235027.GE20321 at wantadilla.lemis.com> "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" writes: : On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 6:33:54 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: : > In message: : > Robert Tillyard writes: : : >> I believe the legal action is over breach on contract with IBM and : >> not on copyright issues. : > : > All of SCO's statements to the court have been contractual. Their : > statements to the press have been inflated to include things that : > aren't actually alledged in the court filings. : : What's not very clear here is that there seem to be two issues. The : IBM issue is, as you say, a contractual one which about which they : have been remarkably vague. The suspension of Linux distribution is a : different matter. From http://www.lemis.com/grog/sco.html: : : On Tuesday, 27 May 2003, I spoke to Kieran O'Shaughnessy, managing : director of SCO Australia. He told me that SCO had entrusted three : independent companies to compare the code of the UnixWare and Linux : kernels. All three had come back pointing to significant : occurrences of common code ("UnixWare code", as he put it) in both : kernels. : : In view of the long and varied history of UNIX, I wondered whether : the code in question might have been legally transferred from an : older version of UNIX to Linux, so I asked him if he really meant : UnixWare and not System V.4. He stated that it was specifically : UnixWare 7. I base my statements on the legal filings that are available at the SCO site. I do not base them on anything that SCO has said to the press, since those statements are nearly universally overinflated. Since these are statements to the press, or other public statements, I trust them as much as I trust public statements by politicians. : > That's the rub. Do they, in point of fact, actually have any code : > they own the Copyright to or the patent rights to? : : Of course they have lots of code with their own copyright. The : release of JFS was one example. Probably the majority of AIX was : developed by IBM, not by AT&T. It's rather similar to the issue with : 4BSD in the early 90s: with a little bit of work you could probably : replace the entire AT&T code in AIX and have a system which did not : require an SCO license. I was speaking of SCO, not IBM. What code does SCO own the copyright to? : For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if SCO's claims were found to be : true. Me too. There's another article that is saying that there are 10-15 line snippets scattered all through the kernel. Give me a break. That claim is so absurd as to be not credible on its face. I can see one or two files, maybe stretching my disbelief to its limits, but I can't see anything more pervasive than that. Warner