Posted on 08/26/2003 7:04:02 PM PDT by Golden Eagle
(All arguments aside, it always help to keep a sense of humor alive...)
That's what they say, but the person they bought it from (Novell) insists otherwise. The problem with insisting that they bought the rights to this code is that the rights to the code had been transferred to Berkeley (and the BSD group) by AT&T before AT&T sold the remaining Unix intellectual property to Novell. Just ask Novell or read the Novell contract; they have been trying to tell SCO this for quite a while, but SCO won't listen.
Your argument seems equivalent to claiming one can't actually own their house unless they were the ones who originally constructed it.
Not at all. My argument is that you don't own every house built with a certain floorplan just because you bought a house built from those floorplans.
Using your analogy, SCO purchased a house from real estate agent named Novell. Novell had purchased that house from a builder named AT&T, who originally designed the house but gave the rights to the plans to a non-profit architectual firm named Berkeley, who let anyone use the plans who wanted to do so, as long as they didn't charge anyone else for the plans.
Now, SCO comes along and not only wants to sell houses based on the design that legally belong to Berkeley, but are claiming that they are the ones who designed the house in the first place, and that all the other people who used Berkeley's "free" design owe them royalties, because they are the rightful owners of the design (based only upon the fact that they bought a house using that design from the Novell realtor).
The fact is, SCO didn't write this code. They also didn't purchase this code (they claim otherwise, but Novell insists that all they purchased was the name "Unix", and in any case Novell couldn't sell them what Novell doesn't own either. And Novell asserts that it didn't own this code).
You lucky guy, I sure wish I had a home.
I'm nearly completely broken up because I do not.
Every day, I try to complete the work that I must, in order to get away and visit them. I'm practically desparate.
And wih any luck, we'll keep this laywer-driven piece of crap off the air forever!
Golden Eagle wrote:It might have been a trade secret at one time, but it is no longer a trade secret. Anything in Linux (or any Open Source project) is not a secret by definition.
Because it is a "trade secret", that they wish to keep secret?
By the way, some of the alleged "trade secrets" are so secret that SCO didn't write the code for them (JFS, NUMA scheduler, RCU, etc.). SCO will never prove that code written by IBM and Sequent is a SCO trade secret. That's a big part of the SCO v. IBM case, and they will lose that part of the case.
Golden Eagle wrote:No, but that's a very flawed analogy.
Here's an analogy - admittedly of signifcantly more importance - but what if classified US Government material got into a book of some sort, would you then expect the government to publicly say "It starts on page 87 and ends on page 95"? I sure hope not.
Saying that did happen, though. Would you then say that the US government could go to everyone who bought the book and say, "Pay us $1,000 per copy for that book and let us lock it in this sealed lexan box so you can see that you have it, but you can't read it. If you don't like that, you can turn the book over to us and never read it again." Would that be alright by you?
SCO is basically asking business users of Linux to give up their rights to use Linux source code as part of their "SCO license for Linux IP" or whatever they call their fraudulent "IP License."
Golden Eagle wrote:Actually, Caldera (now the SCO Group) purchased the rights to "UNIX" from Santa Cruze Operation (now Tarantella), who purchased those rights from Novell, who purchased those rights from AT&T's UNIX Systems Labs division. Caldera (now the SCO Group) also purchased all of the source code for UNIX, and all of the source code, trade names and development of the SCO UNIXware product, which is a UNIX version for Intel computers.
Certainly not, but they did purchase most rights to the code so it is theirs whether they actually developed it or not. Your argument seems equivalent to claiming one can't actually own their house unless they were the ones who originally constructed it.
SCO did not purchase, just as an example, the copyrights and source code to IBM's Journaling File System (JFS). IBM developed the Journaling File System first for OS/2, then ported it to AIX (which is IBM's licensed UNIX product). Now, IBM has also ported JFS to Linux and released it open source as part of the Linux kernel. SCO claims that JFS is one of SCO's "trade secrets" and that IBM doesn't really own it because of a very tortured interpretation of the "derivative works" clause in the AT&T/IBM license agreement for UNIX. So, even though SCO didn't write it and doesn't claim a copyright on JFS, SCO claims that IBM can't sell JFS on any platform other than UNIX (AIX), and that IBM can't release JFS as open source or port it to Linux. The judge and jury haven't ruled on this, but I doubt they will be impressed by SCO's claims.
SCO is making similar claims about the NUMA schedulare and RCU code (which was written entirely at Sequent, now a subsidiary of IBM).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.