[NCLUG] Breaking news! SCO is full of crap (big surprise)

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 01:30:56PM -0600, jbass at dmsd.com wrote:
>secrets seem to forget. Large blocks of code without AT&T copyright in
>Linux is just bad form.

Sure, and as I said before the people who did that deserve the full
wrath available to SCO.  In this case, it seems that SGI may have removed
the AT&T copyright, so perhaps SCO has a claim against it.  It seems
unlikely that SCO will get billions of dollars for the violation of this
advertising clause, however...

>That completely ignores that assumption that many make that just because
>some lines of old V7 code were released under BSD, many lines developed
>for System V in the two decaded since are as well ... which is completely
>false.

I haven't seen anyone making that assumption.  I believe that the reason
people are saying that the newer code is covered under the BSD license
is because back in 2001-ish, Caldera released the code under the BSD
license.

>There will be a day of truth ... when everything is presented in court as
>evidence, and a day to rebut it properly, and not just slander people in
>the process.

Yep.  In the mean-time, SCO really has no justification in trying to
coerce people to pay them licensing revenue.  In fact, a /. story
yesterday mentioned that there were a couple of companies looking for a
couple more companies to join them in filing racketeering charges
against SCO.

The legal analysis last week was that even if SCO wins it's claim
against IBM, it's incredibly unlikely that any jury would then award
them additional damages against individual Linux users.

>Why do linux developers recklessly and purposely remove valid copyrights?

Again, in this case it seems likely that SGI did it for their OS, which
is where it got propogated into Linux.  It seems like proprietary
developers did the damage and it got propogated, so pointing the finger
at those dang reckless Linux developers is -- amusing.

Sean
-- 
 "8 out of 10 Starships that took the Folger's challenge didn't know they
 weren't using Dilithium Crystals."  -- Sean and Anne being silly one night.
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin