Posted on 08/19/2003 7:39:56 AM PDT by Joe Bonforte
Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets
Still true. SCO doesn't want removal, they want a shakedown.
They are now saying that some of the code may have originally been GPL'd,Berkeley code, but if AT&T copied it (remember, SCO themselves bought this in -- they develop NOTHING) then the AT&T and subsequent SCO licence override the GPL.
In plain English, "We copied it, but it's OK; if you copied it from the same source, you have to pay us."
Their legal strategy will hinge on getting a very stupid jury, sending them to sleep with long and irrelevant exhibits, and banging on the table in the closing arguments.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Well, they're secure on that flank, because the company and the OS are both at death's door. There's no money there, and no ethical attorney would let his client waste his money filing against an empty shell.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
In a just world, Boies himself would have his pants sued off.
SCO will not win this case by showing comparisons of non-functional comments. Bring on the subpoenas. Let's see a comparison of real code, and hear the testimony of the programmers and the copyright experts.
http://ftp.lug.udel.edu/pub/oldunix/local/unix/v3wkt/ken/malloc.c
In the README file:
http://ftp.lug.udel.edu/pub/oldunix/local/unix/v3wkt/Readme.html
In January 1999, Dennis Ritchie sent in a copy of the `nsys' UNIX kernel for inclusion in the PUPS Archive. In the accompanying README, he says:
So far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of Unix that currently exists in machine-readable form. ... The dates on the transcription are hard to interpret correctly; if my program that interprets the image are correct, the files were last touched on 22 Jan, 1973. ...
No, it's being Slashdot'ed. The link was posted as an update to the original story about the SCO code, on the front page. There are probably something on the order of 250,000 people trying to read the article.
In my opinion, the second article is a bit better, anyway.
It appears those comments are not relevant: no one has found them anywhere. They are probably from SCO's kernel and truly proprietary.
It was just a lame attempt to obfuscate it. I'm not sure why they even included it. And if you look closely at the code on the second page, you will notice a typo that apparently occurred when cutting/pasting the code into the slide.
The code pre-dates SCO's implementation, and indicates that SCO actually copied it from BSD. That's legal under the BSD copyright, until they claimed it as their own.
http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
It demolishes a number of SCO's claims, point by point. It also provides good information about the origins of Unix.
A court is unlikely to take seriously any attempt by SCO to re-litigate the settlement reached between Unix System Laboratories/Novell and Berkeley over just these issues. To the extent SCO inherited AT&T's contracts and AT&T's UNIX IP, it also inherited the settlement reached in 1994.
In its never-ending silliness campaign, SCO will no doubt claim they intend to do just that, but no judge is going to let them re-open an issue that was settled nine years ago by the then-owners of the properties.
It's slashdotted. (if that means nothing to you: when the open source news site slashdot.org cites something of interest to its readers, the server frequently gets buried. Lwn.net is there, it's just overrun with readers and reeeeeal slow).
For people who want the technical side of this, here is the /. thread... most of you who'd benefit have probably already been there.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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