SCO has *nothing*.
They claimed initially "millions of lines" were lifted from Unix System
V and placed into linux. The tried to show off a couple of examples in
public ... which were promptly shot down, in one case by demonstrating
that the code had been PD for years (and wasn't in any way a clear copy
of that code though there were similarities) and in the other that it
had been provably independently implemented to a very tight
specification of a part of the IP stack.
When it finally got to court they were forced to admit that they
have not one single line that they can point to in Linux that came from
any of "thier" code.
Bear in mind that the legal validity of the copyrights to Unix
System V - for any specific file, if not the collective work - are
***very*** much in doubt given the USL/BSD case 10 years ago.
Novell's contracts with SCO allows them to exercise
plenipotentiary powers over pre-existing Unix contractees, including
IBM, and Novell waived all claims against IBM on SCO's behalf.
Novell now points out, apparently after digging around for a
while to verify that they *never* sold SCO (the original Santa Cruz
Operation) the Unix copyrights, just the marketing rights - with a
payback to Novell, which Santa Cruz SCO paid, which Caldera paid but
which SCO since Caldera reorged as SCO has not.
Last month they floated a trial balloon that since the unix
ABI's were derived from the AT&T code, that those ABI's were SCO
property - and asserted that several ABI headers infringed SCO's
copyright. All of this was shot down from several directions ...
AT&T donated the ABI headers to the Posix committee, Linus points out
mistakes he made in the original headers (still available on the net)
and points to their history that the current versions are clearly
derived from them, and finally that in several instances it has been
demonstrated in case law that a list of names and numbers - (the bulk of
the content of the ABI header files in question) - and especially when
required for interoperability with other public standards - cannot be
copyrighted.
What's left of SCO's case against IBM is a very shakey theory of
"derivative" works (contrary to copyright law definition of derivative
works) in the original contract wording by which IBM and others licensed
the original code - which wording AT&T later disavowed, explicitly to
IBM and through public "newsletters" to all licensees - by which
everything derived from original AT&T unix, even if it no longer
contains any AT&T or later code, must be treated with the same
confidentiality AT&T originally demanded for its own code - but this
theory has clear requisite of "justicable" ownership of the copyrights
in question.
-- TWZ
On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 23:52, Tom Anderson wrote:
> Gregg C Levine wrote:
> > Hello from Gregg C Levine
> > Okay, I'll bite, what does that phrase mean? "catastrophe curve", I
> > confess it's a rather new one to me.
> >
> > But it does make you wonder, just how long SCO will keep hanging
> > around to annoy us.
>
> At the risk of stirring up the brown smelly stuff, does anyone know
> exactly what their claim is and whether it has any merit? From
> reading the page I saw a lot of noise about the ABI, but that doesn't
> seem to make much sense, since that WAS a published standard and
> anyone was free to write code that conformed to it. The only "facts"
> I know are that SCO, through a very roundabout way, ended up as the
> owner of the "official" Unix source code base. Are they claiming that
> Linux contains code lifted from there? I would think that was pretty
> far fetched, as Linus went out of his way to implement the Linux
> kernel "from scratch", and also to always advertise Linux as being
> "unix like", but never to call it Unix.
>
> If it is true that some code was lifted from the source base, which
> the paid for and own, I would think that software vendors would be
> sensitive to their claims. I'm certainly not a champion of SCO, but
> if somebody stole their property, I can understand them being upset
> about it.
>
> Probably not smart to post this to THIS group, but I am curious about
> the truth/falsity of their claims, and I would think you all would be
> up on the details.
>
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