On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 17:56:39 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
In message:
<20030529235027.GE20321(a)wantadilla.lemis.com>
"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog(a)lemis.com> writes:
On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 6:33:54 -0600, M.
Warner Losh wrote:
In message:
<BAFBB8B1.118%rob(a)vetsystems.com>
Robert Tillyard <rob(a)vetsystems.com> writes:
I believe
the legal action is over breach on contract with IBM and
not on copyright issues.
All of SCO's statements to the court have been contractual. Their
statements to the press have been inflated to include things that
aren't actually alledged in the court filings.
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.
I base my statements on the legal filings that are available at the
SCO site. I do not base them on anything that SCO has said to the
press, since those statements are nearly universally overinflated.
Since these are statements to the press, or other public statements, I
trust them as much as I trust public statements by politicians.
The trouble is that there *is* no legal filing on the Linux without
IBM case.
That's the rub. Do they, in point of fact,
actually have any code
they own the Copyright to or the patent rights to?
...
I was speaking of SCO, not IBM. What code does SCO own the copyright
to?
Ah, sorry. Got to pass on that one. They probably have the rights to
XENIX.
For what
it's worth, I'd be astounded if SCO's claims were found to be
true.
Me too. There's another article that is saying that there are 10-15
line snippets scattered all through the kernel. Give me a break.
That claim is so absurd as to be not credible on its face. I can see
one or two files, maybe stretching my disbelief to its limits, but I
can't see anything more pervasive than that.
There are plenty of cases where you need to initialize a data
structure. Many data structures are public knowledge, and
initialization is a brainless enough task that the code could have
been written independently and look almost the same. Does this line
ring a bell?
(*bdevsw[major(bp->b_dev)]->d_strategy) (bp);
How many people have written that independently of each other?
Greg
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