From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 09:20:27 +0930 Subject: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate In-Reply-To: <20030529.063354.51702197.imp@bsdimp.com> References: <200305290749.h4T7nu22092199@ducky.net> <20030529.063354.51702197.imp@bsdimp.com> Message-ID: <20030529235027.GE20321@wantadilla.lemis.com> 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. >> But if it turns out the IBM is guilty of lifting SCO code and >> putting it into Linux I think SCO does have the right to get a bit >> upset about it, after all I wouldn't be to happy if I had to >> compete with a product that's just about free and contains code >> that I wrote. > > 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. If you mean "is there IBM copyright code in Linux?", I think the answer is again yes, but it's under the GPL or possibly IPL, IBM's attempt at a compromise between proprietary licenses and the GPL. I think they've given up on the IPL now. For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if SCO's claims were found to be true. Greg -- Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available URL: