Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: "Linux is a copy of UNIX" (ars technica)

Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: "Linux is a copy of UNIX" (ars technica)

Posted May 2, 2008 1:54 UTC (Fri) by tbrownaw (guest, #45457)
Parent article: Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: "Linux is a copy of UNIX" (ars technica)

At that point, Novell entered into evidence at least 21 examples of OpenSolaris code that had been taken from the SVRX code base (one such example can be found on the OpenSolaris web site) and re-licensed under Sun's open-source CDDL license.

He [Greg Jones, VP of Technology at Novell] further testified that the agreement between SCO and Sun was "extraordinary" in allowing a move from a proprietary license to an open-source license, and if Novell had been asked, it would have prevented SCO from entering into that agreement.

and

SCO argues that it was not authorized to execute license agreements and that interested third parties such as Sun and Microsoft should get their money back, but it says that Novell is not entitled to hold the money in the interim. If you purchased a license from SCO that was unauthorized, the argument is that you'll need sue them to get it back.

Could this be a problem for OpenSolaris, or is Novell stuck with SCO's supposedly unauthorized agreement? (I suppose they could be politically stuck with it even if they aren't legally stuck with it.)

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I think part of the implied argument is that the contracts can't be reversed in any real world
manner, so returning the money is not feasible.  Therefore the contract is de facto valid and
the money should be given to the rightful "seller", so to speak.

Sort of as if your friend sold your car, which was then heavily modded (not wrecked), and you
wanted the money your friend got rather than taking the car back and trying to undo the mods.
Ignore car theft claims for this analogy :-)

You had an agreement with your (former) friend that he could rent your car out to other
people, so long as he respected some earlier rental/leasing (sort of sharing) agreements that
you'd already worked out with some other friends.

So it's not "theft" inte the sense of larceny.  But it was conversion.

Your (former) friend went and *sold* the car; and when you came back to enforce part of the
agreement vis a vis some of the other friends (IBM) then your former friend sued you for
"slander of title" (claiming that you had sold the car to him --- even though the plain text
of your original, written agreement, specifically excluded the title to the car and
specifically established a fiduciary relationship between your (former) friend and yourself.

Yep!  That's about it.

(Other than the quibbles about the analogies between a single tangible car and the infinitely
duplicatable and modifiable sources in software).


JimD