Re: Text of SCO's complaint - More about Lions and UNIX [LWN.net]

Re: Text of SCO's complaint - More about Lions and UNIX

Posted Mar 13, 2003 6:04 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957)
Parent article: Re: Text of SCO's complaint

Although Lions did document the UNIX source and use it for a class, it was explicitly not disclosure. From the front of his text (UNIX Operating System Source Code Level Six, 2nd printing, 1977, as found in Lions Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, 1996): "This information is proprietary and is the property of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. Its reproduction or disclosure to others, either orally or in writing, is prohibited without written permission of Bell Laboratories."

A far cry from the source licenses I see every day; I'm glad I'm going to college now rather than 30 years ago. :) Anyway, this is definitely not a disclosure of the source as claimed.

Relatedly, here's all the copyright blurbs about SCO in the text. From the copyright page: "Portions reprinted by permission of the Santa Cruz Operations, Inc. (SCO). To the extent SCO has an intellectual property interest in the material contained herein, SCO has granted a license to publish solely for the purpose of creating an educational work. SCO grants no license for any other user of this material." While this doesn't grant any sort of license to the source itself, it seems it would invalidate any future "knowledge poisoning" claims.

Dennis Ritchie's introduction has a little SCO sucking-up: "Happily, SCO, the current leader in providing UNIX operating systems and applications, has agreed on the historical and education value of republishing Lions's commentary and the souce code on which it is based..."

Finally, perhaps most interesting, there's a prefatory note from Michael Tilson, president and CIO of SCO. "A generation of operating system developers used this work as a key learning tool... I'm very pleased that this work can now be made available to the public. It is a part of our history, and we can still learn from it today."

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