Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 16:01 -0400, James Knott wrote:

...

http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2153

So what did SCO really buy when they bought UnixWare? All the hoopla at the time was that SCO now owned Unix. I do not recall anyone setting the record straight at that time. Especially Novell. Did SCO just buy the source for the UnixWare implementation of Unix (i.e., SVR4.2)? And the rights to sell compiled versions of UnixWare?

Just curious.

So is Novell in the position of picking all (any) good ideas from the SVR4.2 code and contributing them to Linux? At least in terms of ownership of said ideas? There may be non-legal reasons not to do so. But if this does or does not happen is fully Novell's decision?

Despite the bad press UnixWare got, I was a happy user. The last release we did used the KDE 2.? desktop. Not too bad.

The original plan was to sell everything, but old SCO didn't have the money. So, Novell sold them the business to manage on behalf of Novell, with SCO getting a 5% commision. They also got the rights to Unixware going forward. Novell had earlier said they couldn't put code from Unix in Linux, due to ownership problems. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 4/1/2010 2:51 AM, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

On Wed, 2010-03-31 at 15:51 -0400, James Knott wrote:

...

The original plan was to sell everything, but old SCO didn't have the money. So, Novell sold them the business to manage on behalf of Novell, with SCO getting a 5% commision. They also got the rights to Unixware going forward. Novell had earlier said they couldn't put code from Unix in Linux, due to ownership problems.

But if Novell own Unix, what would those problems be? It must then be that they own only part of Unix. Who else owns part of the technology and code? Or is the ownership problem that they want to keep owning it, and releasing it to the world ends that? They are entitled to that, of course. I am just curious what the reasons are.

Like many commercial products, of any type, software or hardware, or even mere design/art content, it includes things they licenced from others. Whoever "owns unix" did not actually write every line in it, nor did they buy complete rights to every line they didn't write. It's almost never an option even if they had unlimited funds. AT&T gave SCO rip-off deals to try to keep them from even being in the game and competing since day one (that's why SCO did things like not include the c compiler or text processing or various other subsystems by default, not to be greedy and charge more for the full set of pieces, the opposite, to thwart AT&T's high licensing by simply not shipping those things.). And over the years lots of chunks of code have been licensed, not bought, and many of those chunks of code were themselves comprised of several licensed parts that came from different people each with their own different peculiar stipulations. So, say one day SCO wanted to add a gui desktop to their OS. Ok they look at writing it from scratch and then they shop around and finally buy a ready made product from someone else, except, they can't buy it they can only license it and forward royalties to the original authors from each sale. Now lets look at that desktop, it may include lots of graphics and video and audio libraries and codecs to display gif images, play mp3's, gui widgets like motif), art contents like fonts (Ever actually try to license a font for redistribution from Ascender or Monotype? & thats just a font!), etc... each of those libraries & other content probably came from someone else. Now take Joe's Super Duper mp3 library, it probably contains code licenced from one guy for file and stream handling and from another guy (Fraunhoffer) for the mp3 algorithm and optimized core implimentation, and the optimized implimentation from Fraunhoffer might contain some special assembly code for doing fast transforms and memory management within cpu cache from yet someone else. It goes on and on. Just as free software is usually built out of re-used pieces from countless prior works in an almost infinitely nested/branching structure like tree roots, so was/is commercial software. But with commercial software each of those pieces comes with some sort of legal restriction attached. If you the developer of some high level late generation product want to give your code away, you can: * Try to buy the full rights to every line of code in your product. That's effectively impossible. Many of the original organizations may be gone or the individuals dead, so there is no possibility of negotiating a new deal. Yet, that does not relieve you of your current licensing obligations. Maybe you are still paying royalties to some bank or heir who acquired the original rights through forfeit/death/other. Or even if not, you are still not free to disclose code that was obtained under non disclosure. You might be able to give away binaries, but you might not even be free to allow others to re-distribute those same binaries, let alone the code that generated them. * Try to re-implement everything you can't disclose, maybe by writing it all from scratch, maybe by buying it (fully this time) from others. You might do this if you had the fortunes to spend and the time, and some reason that made it worth it. Then again, you may be in for legal battles where you'd have to prove utter clean-room techniques where the developers never saw the original code nor reverse-engineered things that aren't allowed. Good luck with that. * Try to strip out everything you don't own fully. The result will likely be a non-functional block of swiss cheese that no one would want. In some cases even that might nit be good enough. Sometimes code you wrote may itself disclose too much about the code it works with, and so you may not eve be free to disclose some of the code you wrote yourself. (Think of how video card manufacturers don't release open source driver code, because it would provide too much insight to their compoetitors into how the hardware was designed.) SCO/Caldera themselves already gave away the "Ancient Unix" source years ago, which was probably that last version that didn't start to include entanglements like above. And now that I mention that, I wonder if the recent ruling has any effect on that past action? Is it still public domain? Did SCO/Caldera actually have the right to release it in the first place? -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org