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

[jbass at dmsd.com]

Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> writes:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 01:30:56PM -0600, jbass at dmsd.com wrote:
> >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.

Actully they do ... the only case they wouldn't is if SCO had no rights
to the UNIX IP and copyrights as Novel mistakenly asserted at the beginning
of this mess. Since SCO presented the contract ammendments, and Novel
confirmed them, that issue only remains to provide confusion.

If SCO failed to protect it's copyrights and IP, then it could be later
argued that they effectively abandoned any and all rights to it.

The real issue is that people are not particularly obligated to settle
today under the current SCO terms, they can always wait for a judgement
and accept whatever SCO's terms are following the judgement in hopes
they might be better.

> 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.

There is lots of speculation about what a jury may or may not do. Past
awards include allowing the copyright holder the ability to demand that
all improperly copied and stolen copies be destroyed, or royalties be
paid. These proceedings can not take IP from SCO without compensation,
unless it can be shown that SCO abandoned the IP ... which brings us
back to their protecting their rights thru notification to the Linux
community.

The Linux community, in recognizing V7 UNIX code in Linux without the
copyrights, gives SCO leverage in court since there is little dispute
about the ownership or the violation. Add in the potential that SysV
code is also in Linux, and there is a clear tainting of the Linux source
that will offer proof for SCO's case and open the door to remedies that
the Linux community may not like.

> >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

If it were just SGI regarding the NUMA code (which wasn't part of V7), I
think there would be a way to move past this quickly. That most of the
old UNIX server shops have violated clean room standards makes the SGI
and IBM problems just the tip of the ice berg.

John