Does SCO own read-copy-update? [LWN.net]

Does SCO own read-copy-update?

Posted Jun 13, 2003 15:51 UTC (Fri) by ssharkey (subscriber, #4451)
Parent article: Does SCO own read-copy-update?

If you look at the patch, there are several places where the following
copyright occurs:

+ *
+ * Copyright (c) International Business Machines Corp., 2001
+ *

And this comment also stands out:

+ * Author: Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@sequent.com>
+ * (Based on a Dynix/ptx implementation by
+ * Paul Mckenney <paul.mckenney@us.ibm.com>)
+ *

No SCO copyrights occur anywhere that I could find in the patch.

*ASSUMING* that IBM did not assign the copyrights to SCO at some
point in it's relationship, HOW, exactly, does SCO claim any
ownership rights?

The original author was from Sequent, based on code from an
IBM employee (who also happens to be the author of the paper
cited in LWN, and apparently contributed to IBM's patenting the
technique). Unless SCO somehow obtained all the *exclusive*
copyrights (and rights to the associated patents) to all code
from Project Monterey, it's difficult to see where they have a
claim. In fact, IBM may certainly have patent infringment claims
vs SCO, and/or copyright violations if this code is indeed in
SCO Unix.

All this "proves" is that there is code from IBM in the kernel.
It does NOT prove that SCO ever had any rights to that code.

-Scott

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Does SCO own read-copy-update?

Posted Jun 13, 2003 16:23 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

It's possible that the Monterey contract gives each participant the right to use the code developed in it, but not the right to transfer the license to this code to outsiders without the permission of the other participants. This would make sense for a partnership agreement between proprietary software vendors, as it would prohibit commoditization of the results if one of the participants lost interest while letting each of the participants get their money's worth.

Does SCO own read-copy-update?

Posted Jun 13, 2003 16:50 UTC (Fri) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

Possibly. But I get the impression that the consortium members frequently donated their own, in-house code to Monterey. And if some code was written for Dynix/ptx (on behalf of Sequent), it seems likely the Sequent would retain rights to use the code independently. Would IBM or Sequent really sign a contract which said, "SCO can veto how you use code that you wrote?" Maybe they would, but I'd expect IBM's lawyers to be a bit more cautious than that.

The RCU code appears to have been written by one of the original RCU researchers for use in Dynix. IBM apparently now owns Dynix, and the RCU patent.