Steven T. Hatton wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Friday 12 March 2004 04:29 am, Fergus Wilde wrote:
There was once a Unix company that seems to have had nice people in it known as the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).
I used to build boxes with SCO Unix installed for NASA a few jobs back.
'Intellectual property' means owning ideas - it's a direct insult to all natural justice and all natural human evolution and is a clever mechanism to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is in itself a scam. It makes money only for lawyers and a few speculators - if it genuinely protected inventors we might sympathise a bit more.
I have to say I can't fully agree with you here. People do have a right to keep their copyrights, etc. There are some real challenges for the computing industry in this area, and software pattens are something I have a mixed opinion on.
HTH, but I think your project of trying to understand the case without reading a lot of detail may be difficult to see through.
I think Art did a good enough job summarizing it. The real question seems to hinge on whether Novell are recognized by the courts as having rightful control of the contested items. The fact MS have now entered the fray, or so it would seem, makes me wonder if there may be some legal reprocussions heading their direction. If what seems to have happened really did, it probably amounts to criminal conduct.
Another big part of it, is the relevance of AT&T's statement, back in 1985, that software written by others is not considered derivative works. They only claim rights to actual AT&T code included by others. Now SCO is trying to claim *EVERYTHING* involved with Unix is theirs.