On Tue, 14 Aug 2007 10:55:37 -0400
James Knott
No matter if there was some SVx code in Linux, since SCO doesn't own the copyright, it's not their battle. If there is any SVx in Linux, Novell (SUSE) is legally distributing it under GPL, as they own the copyright. SCO's definitition of "derivate work" was simply beyond belief and in stark contrast to what they claimed WRT to their own work, after the Novell agreement. Since and while SCO has failed to identify any potentially infringing work it's to late to add more, they haven't got anything to sue about now.
You fail to look at the SCO vs. IBM case. While the copyright issue was
brought up, it was only part of the case. The original case is that SCO
claims that SMP, JFS and NUMA are "derivative works" as defined in the
contract IBM signed with AT&T. And, in a strict sense they are (at
least NUMA and SMP). What SCO is claiming is that they (SCO) have the
rights to derivative works. While I am far from being an attorney, I
have had some experience with the AT&T licenses back in the early
1980s. At that time, we decided to reverse engineer (not my decision)
Unix for our system. In that case, we considered partitioning the
development so that none of the developers had access to Unix source
code. Other companies, such as Digital, were very paranoid about it
because they not only sold Unix, but also sold other operating systems
that compete with Unix.
"SCO has failed to identify any potentially infringing work" refers
primarily to the copyright issues. The license issue with the kernel
code is still part of the case. The claim is that IBM, in violation of
their license (perpetual license issues by AT&T), contributed the 3
elements mentioned above. Assuming that IBM can prove to the court that
the Linux version of JFS was not part of AIX, then the case comes down
to SMP and NUMA, still important parts of the Linux kernel. There are
also part of IBM participation in Project Monterey that are still on
the table that don't have a lot to do with copyrights.
Most likely, the outcome of the SCO vs. Novell case will probably
shoot the remaining legs out from under SCO if Novell is successful,
but that remains to be adjudicated.
Another note on derivative works. In the early days of Windows,
compiler vendors received royalties on anything that was built using
their compilers. Think of it this way. I have a product written in C,
and I build it statically. Built into that C executable are
not only translations from C to machine code, but also built-ins, and
the entire C runtime library. Back in the 1980s it was a common
practice.
--
Jerry Feldman