OK, I was speculating there, but only a little bit. I have personal, first hand knowledge that by 1981 all of the code on that slide that came from malloc() was common knowledge. I have several books that I didn't sign any NDA's to get that have that code in them. The earliest was copyrighted 1979 and the copyright was not AT&T or any predecessor in interest to TSG (The SCO Group).cc2k wrote:Golden Eagle replied:
In short, this probably wasn't even a trade secret in 1975. It is entirely possible that this code was copied by an AT&T engineer from a textbook or technical journal back in the early 1970's, and that it is not an original work of anyone at AT&T.
Wild speculations certainly seem to be your specialty, if not this how the GPL servers possibly got hacked.
There is no way that TSG can claim trade secret status on this or that IBM violated any license agreement requiring them to protect trade secrets. This code was common knowledge before IBM licensed UNIX SVR2 (or was it SVR3) from AT&T.
One issue that TSG is going to run into here is when you have a copyrighted work and you allow the copyright to be infringed over a long period of time, you lose your right to enforce that copyright. The actual legal requirements are somewhat arcane, but in the most basic terms, if the statute of limitations has run out on the first infringement, then IBM can stand up in court and say that AT&T (and TSG as a successor to TSG) failed to enforce their copyright against others (including the authors and publishers of the books I have) in a timely fashion, and by doing that they have waived their right to enforce the copyright forever. There's a legalese term for this that I can't recall right at the moment. IBM used the proper terminology for this in the "boilerplate" responses to TSG's original complaint.
Well, Caldera, the company now doing business under the name "The SCO Group" and the one that filed the lawsuit against IBM released this code on January 23, 2002. The letter of license for that is available online at ftp://ftp.tribug.org/pub/tuhs/Caldera-license.pdf. Since you obviously didn't click the link in the original story, I'll put the text of that letter in this post.cc2k wrote:Golden Eagle replied:
As far as this representing "infringement," I doubt that will stick.
You're guessing again, but it may not matter if SCO can show that without their "official" release to copy this code, which may not have ever been explicitly granted, anyone who copied it did so illegally.
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Golden Eagle wrote:They want business customers to pay for something they no longer own and can't legally demand payment for. They also want business customers to pay The SCO Group a license fee for code written by IBM, Sequent (and probably SGI and others) that is copyrighted by IBM and Sequent. This is code that The SCO Group does not have a copyright to and that the SCO Group has no economic investment in the development costs, and they want businesses to pay the SCO Group a license fee for this code.
What your mistaken about is that they want to sue everyone involved, every end user, when actually they just want business customers to pay.
As one business user of Linux, I can say, when they can prove that they own something that I need to license, I'll consider paying the license (or I'll stop using their intellectual property). Until they prove it, they can go pound sand.
They also want IBM to pay them $1 billion to continue to use software that IBM developed and IBM copyrighted.
with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems