Re: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate

On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 6:33:54 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: What's not very clear here is that there seem to be two issues. The IBM issue is, as you say, a contractual one which about which they have been remarkably vague. The suspension of Linux distribution is a different matter. From http://www.lemis.com/grog/sco.html: On Tuesday, 27 May 2003, I spoke to Kieran O'Shaughnessy, managing director of SCO Australia. He told me that SCO had entrusted three independent companies to compare the code of the UnixWare and Linux kernels. All three had come back pointing to significant occurrences of common code ("UnixWare code", as he put it) in both kernels. In view of the long and varied history of UNIX, I wondered whether the code in question might have been legally transferred from an older version of UNIX to Linux, so I asked him if he really meant UnixWare and not System V.4. He stated that it was specifically UnixWare 7. Of course they have lots of code with their own copyright. The release of JFS was one example. Probably the majority of AIX was developed by IBM, not by AT&T. It's rather similar to the issue with 4BSD in the early 90s: with a little bit of work you could probably replace the entire AT&T code in AIX and have a system which did not require an SCO license. If you mean "is there IBM copyright code in Linux?", I think the answer is again yes, but it's under the GPL or possibly IPL, IBM's attempt at a compromise between proprietary licenses and the GPL. I think they've given up on the IPL now. For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if SCO's claims were found to be true. Greg -- Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers