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.
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.