SCO suspends, Gartner warns [LWN.net]

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Posted May 15, 2003 4:20 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
Parent article: SCO suspends, Gartner warns

According to one interview on May 12th, Chris Sontag of SCO source was not aware of the implications of violating the GPL as late as May 12th (the interview has since been removed). If they had subscribed to lwn they would have known on May 8th. :)

A comment on osnews.com forum says that SCO contractors are claiming that SCO owns the intellectual property of all the files in /sbin/. While SCO admits that the source code for the Linux implementations is original, it holds that since SCO owns the copyrights to the original UNIX, it owns all the ideas.

The problem with this for SCO is that the courts are going to look at the actual laws. With the existing laws, SCO has no case. SCO doesn't have any patents on the ideas, SCO doesn't own the copyrights (according to the contractors) and BSD has already been proven a legal UNIX reimplementation in court.

BTW. I read on LKML that SCO may have copied GPL code illegally in it's ext2 implementation. If someone had a copy of that, it would be interesting to type strings on the .o file and compare it with the Linux module.

(Log in to post comments)

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Posted May 15, 2003 4:54 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

A comment on osnews.com forum says that SCO contractors are claiming that SCO owns the intellectual property of all the files in /sbin/.

It's hard to know what they're claiming to own, since they won't actually tell anyone, but it seems like about half of it is probably covered by standards like POSIX, FIPS, etc. What I would like to know: is SCO claiming that it's illegal to implement a POSIX compatible OS? That would raise the interest of quite a few people, I would think.

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Posted May 15, 2003 5:29 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

> It's hard to know what they're claiming to own, since they won't actually tell anyone...

I wonder if it would be possible and sensible for some of the most affected stakeholders (like Red Hat and SuSE) to sue SCO in order to find out? These companies could credibly claim to be harmed by SCO allegations, and request the court to make SCO either prove its claims, or shut up.
A bit like the security researcher (forgot the name) who wanted a court to rule if publishing his research was infringing the DMCA.

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Posted May 15, 2003 16:41 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Given the circumstances, yes, I would say that RedHat et al, and even IBM, were possible candidates for an Emergency Injunction, but it's questionable whether they'd get it.

A shame, really.

The surest way to make this go away, as Darl "God will roast their kernels in hell" McBride is no doubt aware, is for IBM to simply buy SCO, which they could almost certainly do out of pocket change. Is the GPL test case worth the hassle? Likely not; the issues are too muddy for my taste.

But maybe it's just me.

So many things are just me.

SCO suspends, Gartner warns

Posted May 15, 2003 5:33 UTC (Thu) by addw (subscriber, #1771) [Link]

If they want license fees from anyone that implements all/part/... of POSIX, I assume that they will want some from M$ - as that company has a POSIX module -- of does the M$ shareholder stake in SCO/Caldera give them a free to use ticket ?