Quiet you!
Posted on 08/19/2003 7:39:56 AM PDT by Joe Bonforte
Well, duh. Unless they get an idiot judge, they will be instructed to have their Darl show up Monday morning with one of the following:
1. A listing of the allegedly infringing code (under notice that subsequent infrigement claims based any code absent from this list will be dismissed with prejudice).
2. His toothbrush and (optionally) a supply of Vaseline[tm].
You guys just LOVE to assume stuff is yours, as soon as you get your hands on it. However without explicit rights to do something, like redistribute, you have nada.
The only letter Ive seen said it excluded Sys III and Sys V from this license. Even if it did, I've heard this particular license cannot be redistributed under GPL.
Unfortunately for Boies, when he is done pulling things out of his rear end, it will be evident that all he has is a big pile of the same stuff that comes out of everybody's rear end.
But in a world where millions of people believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that the stars rule people's destinies, and that government can run the economy for the public benefit, I suppose that is a plausible explanation.
As a subsequent owner, SCO cannot now undo a settlement entered into nine years ago by a previous owner. That's why they call them "settlements." They settle the issue.
"Precedents" are a red herring here. There is nothing to litigate. This issue was litigated, and settled, by large institutions with competent technical and legal advice. No judge will re-open it now; otherwise no 'settlement' would ever settle anything.
It would be hilarious if James Carville suddenly grew two-foot-long purple hair, Tweety Bird, but that isn't going to happen either.
More rhetoric, at least you cut down on accompanied insults this time.
What in this settlement assures this code couldn't belong to ATT/SCO? It may be there, but so far your completely disorganized side hasn't been able to produce it despite repeated questioning, just rhetoric like above they gleaned from some blogboard.
Whatever, I really don't understand infantile whining like that. Something about tweety birds and purple hair? Ask your mom, maybe she knows.
At this point, the document (which was sealed) does not have to say anything. Upon obtaining this settlement — whatever was in it... we don't even have to know — the University of California promptly released all the BSD code under what is now called the "BSD license."
It's been nine years now. Neither AT&T, nor Novell, nor the Santa Cruz Operation, nor even Caldera/SCO until very recently, objected. The doctrines of laches and waivers say that if none of these original or subsequent owners of the AT&T code base has complained in nine years about this code being openly available under the BSD license, then they have waived any rights they might have had to the BSD code, even if they now change their mind.
DOCTRINE OF LACHES Black's Law Dictionary 6th Edition. Laches/laechaz/leychez/laeshez/. "Doctrine of laches" is based upon maxim that equity aids the vigilant and not those who slumber on their rights. It is defined as neglect to assert a right or claim which, taken together with lapse of time and other circumstances causing prejudice to adverse party, operates as bar in court of equity.
Whether SCO likes it or not, the behavior of the previous owners over the past 9 years contitutes a waiver of just the sort of rights SCO wishes it could now claim. The world assumed that the U of C was acting in good faith in releasing the code, no one objected for many years, and in the interim huge investments have been made in the belief that this code was available under the terms that the U of C said it was.
No one can claim that AT&T, Novell, or the Santa Cruz Operation were incompetent to act on their own behalf, or were restrained in any way from asserting any rights they wished to assert. They did not do so.
It is reasonable to assume that the settlement reached in the court case gave the U of C the legal right to release the code as it did, and that this is why there was no objection from AT&T/USL/Novell. But even if the settlement doesn't say that, after nine years it's too late to complain.
Golden Eagle wrote:Actually, the BSD/Novell case was settled by a contract between BSD and Novell. Novell agreed to drop their lawsuit (inherited from UNIX Systems Labs) against BSD, and agreed that BSD could have full, unconditional rights to the source code in several different modules. BSD agreed to put AT&T copyright notices in a few files that contained both BSD and AT&T code, and agreed to allow Novell to use that code in UNIX free of charge.
Wrong, the BSD/ATT case was never decided by judge or jury, so it is not any sort of legal precident. Sorry this complicates your defense so much.
BSD took the source code that they obtained from Novell under this agreement and published it under the BSD open source license. Under the terms of that license, anyone (including Linux kernel programmers) can use the BSD code, provided they abide by the conditions of the license. The main (perhaps only) condition of that license is that you must include the BSD copyright notices (and any AT&T copyright notice if that file includes the AT&T code).
As a successor to Novell, The SCO Group is bound by this settlement agreement contract. If they try to violate the terms of the settlement, they will have BSD all over them, not to mention the federal judge that approved the settlement and handled the previous lawsuit.
BSD code (which is basically totally free code) has been used by Novell, and by Santa Cruz Operation in the UnixWare flavors of UNIX (and possibly in other developments of UNIX System V). BSD code has also been used in Linux by various Linux contributors. This means that there will be some common code between SCO UnixWare and Linux. This does not indicate any copyright infringements by either the Linux developers or by SCO. It indicates a common source for the code before it went into either UnixWare or Linux.
TSG's "pattern matching" crew better understand this before they start accusing IBM or anyone else of infringing on TSG's intellectual property by using BSD code.
Golden Eagle wrote:The whole AT&T/UNIX Systems Labs/Novell v. BSDI thing is completely settled. Novell and BSDI settled this contractually by a settlement agreement. As a successor to Novell, Caldera and The SCO Group are bound by this settlement agreement. They will not be able to make the allegation that BSD code came from AT&T. They agreed that BSD owns all rights to BSD code as part of the settlement agreement.
You have no proof of that, that I've seen. BSD could have gotten it from ATT.
What I have is a copy of the book, and the "fair use doctrine" which allows me to use sample code and examples from that book in my own work, or in work that I develop for commercial uses.cc2kwrote:Golden Eaglereplied:
In 1996, the Santa Cruz Operation published this code in a book with no restrictions on it's use.
You guys just LOVE to assume stuff is yours, as soon as you get your hands on it. However without explicit rights to do something, like redistribute, you have nada.
Look, when you were in school and had to do a book report on a book for a class assignment, did you have to get a "redistribution license" or a "quoting license" from the author of the book to include quotes from the book in your report?
It's the same thing with computer books and source code. It's called the "fair use doctrine," and it's a very well established principle of law that goes way back.
Golden Eagle wrote:The code in question didn't come from UNIX System III or UNIX System V. It came from UNIX V5 and UNIX V6 and UNIX V7 and possibly other versions of UNIX that were released in their entirety by that license letter.
The only letter Ive seen said it excluded Sys III and Sys V from this license.
Golden Eagle wrote:You heard wrong. There's nothing in that license that would exclude code covered by that license from being released under the GPL.
Even if it did, I've heard this particular license cannot be redistributed under GPL.
What? It didn't get put into Linux but until just a couple of years ago, so the lawsuit seems very timely. SCO does not consider U of C 'competition' in the enterprise server market, despite what BSD people might tell you. Once SCO's business territory got invaded, and they found the alleged theft, they litigated.
But it's sealed, Nick Danger just said. So you really don't know what it says for sure, right?
fair use doctrine...
It doesn't allow book publishers to give IP to others for reprint though, which is a better analogy to what happened here.
You heard wrong. There's nothing in that license that would exclude code covered by that license from being released under the GPL.
The key is "that licensce", being a BST-"type" when referring to Calderra releases, right?
Gotta run. Have fun defending Linux, since this is just the start.
Dude, you have to at least admit this is interesting evidence. You can't hope to completely stonewall, refusing to even see the damaging evidence here posted. That outs you completely (as if everyone didn't already have your number, which they clearly do).
That kind of blind loyalty to the cause only serves to prove you're a biased advocate. If you're going to use this screen name to pretend you're just an uninvolved person posting his opinion, you have to at least pretend you see the evidence that isn't favorable. Blind denial only makes you the (further) object of our entertainment!
"This is Chewbacca. Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now why would an 8-foot tall wookie wanna live on a planet with a bunch of 3-foot tall Ewoks? Why, I tell you why: because it doesn't make sense, that's why. So when you go into that jury room, I want you to think about your answer, about Chewbacca. And ask yourself, 'Does placing publicly-available code from the University of California into linux confer new rights on the SCO Group, Inc., rights that it did not have before that?' Thank you, your honor."
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