Perhaps this explains their refusal to say what the IP is...

Perhaps this explains their refusal to say what the IP is...

Posted May 29, 2003 19:51 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: The SCO case gets weirder

It is possible that the reason that SCO hasn't been saying what code in Linux offends them is not because they want to save it for their day in court or because they want to prevent people from removing it, but because they are not permitted by law to reveal the information. If they don't own it, and are only licensed to license it (and, presumably, not under their choice of terms, either), it might be considered to be a violation of Novell's copyright for SCO to release to the public the UNIX code which they believe to be duplicated in Linux, and likewise a possible violation (under precedent from the 2600 DeCSS case) to refer to the Linux code they believe to be a copy of it.

Presumably, they were hoping to own the IP involved outright before suing anyone over it, if they ever decided to actually sue someone. They probably missed Novell's announcement a month ago that their going to support Linux and won't look kindly on a third party threatening Novell's customers with Novell's property (imagine Dell sending threatening letters to non-Dell Windows users...).

Note that it seems like the IBM case has nothing to do with Novell's IP, but to allege that IBM pulled the scam of starting a joint project, getting some of SCO's (new) ideas, and then ditching the project to go implement the ideas on their own, in Linux. This is something that's been done many times in the past (allegedly, at least). The whole UNIX IP thing is an unrelated ploy to get people to continue to use UNIX, which generated license revenue for SCO.

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