Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

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On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 10:18 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote:
>
> > The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded
> licence
> > to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own
> the
> > copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by
> a
> > judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source.
>
> This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could
> to make it unambiguous what I meant.
>
> A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is
> NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a
> court of law).


Not so fast.  What the court said was that Novell did not transfer the
copyrights to Caldera *using a specific legal instrument at a specific
time*.  There is no judicial opinion saying either that Novell did, or
Novell did not, transfer the copyright on some other occasion.  So the
Caldera license is clouded but not ipso facto void.  (See .sig below)
Remember also that in litigation a fact is any point on which both (or all)
sides agree, and its factuality by ordinary standards is irrelevant.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
The first thing you learn in a lawin' family is that there ain't
no definite answers to anything.  --Calpurnia in To Kill A Mockingbird

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