Whoops!

Whoops!

Posted Jun 18, 2003 9:12 UTC (Wed) by james (subscriber, #1325)
Parent article: The amended SCO complaint

This time they've made a mistake...

The amended complaint states that:

Pursuant to its rights under the controlling agreements, IBM was entitled to 100 days to cure its underlying contractual breaches, provided it was willing and able to do so. Both parties were contractually required to "exert their mutual good faith best efforts to resolve any alleged breach short of termination."

Throughout these 100 days, SCO has continually been asked where the allegedly offending code is located. They have been told that it would be rewritten as soon as we saw that it was a problem. They have been assured that there is no way we could delete all copies worldwide of the offending code.

Yet they have only recently pointed to vague areas of the kernel. I cannot see how this counts as "good faith best efforts".

In other words, IBM may (or may not) have breached the letter of the agreement, but SCO have just admitted that they breached both the letter and the spirit.

Incidentally, although they have got rid of a lot of the misleading or factually untrue statements in the previous complaint, they've added some more howlers:

Were it not for UNIX System V, there would be no UNIX technology or derivative works available for IBM and others to copy into Linux.

and

SCO is also the sole and exclusive owner of copyrights related to UNIX System V source code and documentation and peripheral code and systems related thereto.

BSD? Microsoft (through Xenix?) And what about the other contributions from Unix vendors?

Prior to this time [the start of Project Monterey], IBM had not developed any expertise to run UNIX on an Intel processor and instead was confined to its Power PC processor.

AIX v1 (on PS/2)?

[Before IBM]...the Linux developers did not have access to sophisticated high-end enterprise class multiprocessor systems, nor did they have any particular interest in supporting such systems.

Caldera and Alan Cox's SMP motherboard?

SCO’s Trade Secrets [including UNIX source] derive independent economic value, are not generally known to third persons, are not readily ascertainable by proper means by other persons who can obtain economic value from their disclosure and use, and are subject to reasonable efforts by SCO and its predecessors to maintain secrecy.

From the company that made Version 7 source code available...

James.

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