Is that all it takes to permanently steal code these days? Just have some rogue post it on Usenet, and *BAM*, no longer yours.
Look at the date. It predates SCO Unix. SCO can't claim prior art afterwards.
Golden Eagle wrote:Not exactly. That posting does negate any attempt to claim this code as a trade secret, though.
Is that all it takes to permanently steal code these days? Just have some rogue post it on Usenet, and *BAM*, no longer yours.
Golden Eagle wrote:Well, it wasn't "illegally" made public.
It actually makes sense that if SCO was willing to show any portion of their evidence in public, it might be something that was already 'public', even if illegally.
In 1993 or 1994, in the settlement between Novell (as successor to AT&T UNIX Systems Labs, and a predecessor in interest to The SCO Group) and BSD, Novell and USL agreed that BSD had full rights to this code (among many other things). BSD almost immediately released everything they got in the USL/Novell settlement under an open source license with almost no restrictions on use in derivative works.
In 1996, the Santa Cruz Operation published this code in a book with no restrictions on it's use. Actually, a very similar piece of code was published without any explicit restrictions in a book in 1978, and this code appears without restrictions in many other books, too. The fair use doctrine allows the use of small sections of computer code from books without attribution or license.
Then, again in 2002, Caldera (the same company as The SCO Group, but before the name change) released this code under an open source license.
If the code in Linux came from BSD, or from any of the other sources I've mentioned, then it is not an infringement. Even if the Linux infringement pre-dated the 1994 release by BSD, the BSD license (and the Caldera license) effectively establishes the actual value of the damages at zero. That's also the value of any license that SCO wants to sell me on this particular piece of code. I'm not sure that this code is running on any of my Linux machines, but if it is, I wouldn't pay money for a license to it because it is widely available as free code.