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

Sean Reifschneider jafo at tummy.com
Tue Aug 19 16:52:28 MDT 2003


On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 02:44:26PM -0600, jbass at dmsd.com wrote:
>Actully they do ... the only case they wouldn't is if SCO had no rights

I'll take the word of an experienced, practicing, lawyer over yours.
Sorry.  Besides, by the time that the IBM case is over with, the
disputed code is going to be gone.  In fact, as someone pointed out, the
code that SCO just displayed had been removed some time ago.

SCO is sueing IBM for breech of contract by releasing code into Linux.
An experienced lawyer believes that even if they win all the claims
against IBM, that they will have no legal way to go after Linux users
trying to get paid *AGAIN* for that breech.

I guess I'm not familiar with your qualifications, John.  What is your
legal experience, and why haven't you challenged the analysis provided
on /. which seems to quite solidly point the other direction?

Remember, SCO is claiming billions of dollars of lost profit because IBM
let some of their secrets slip out into Linux.  If they actually then go
out and profit from it by charging individual Linux users for their use
of the IP, SCO would seem to be invalidating their previous claim.  That
seems to be what was being said in the legal analysis, but IANAL.  That
seems like common sense though.

>paid. These proceedings can not take IP from SCO without compensation,
>unless it can be shown that SCO abandoned the IP ... which brings us

You seem to be confirming the above here.  If SCO gets billions of
dollars from IBM, they have been compensated for their lost IP.  If they
try to get that from the individual Linux users, ditto.  Either one on
it's own might stand, but SCO is trying to do one route while
threatening Linux users to try to make the second happen at the same
time.

>The Linux community, in recognizing V7 UNIX code in Linux without the
>copyrights, gives SCO leverage in court since there is little dispute

It's not quite that clear, as K&R published it without attribution as
well, and therefore it may be considered independant knowledge.  Again,
this code has already been removed from Linux, before SCO even
demonstrated it.

>If it were just SGI regarding the NUMA code (which wasn't part of V7), I

Again, the code that started this thread *WAS* V7 code, *WAS* released
under BSD license, and *WAS* published in a number of other sources
including K&R apparently without attribution.

Sean
-- 
 Open Source.  Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin
      Back off man. I'm a scientist.   http://HackingSociety.org/



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