The SCO Group would STILL be in violation of the GPL license

The SCO Group would STILL be in violation of the GPL license - and the FSF do care

Posted Jul 20, 2003 14:37 UTC (Sun) by NZheretic (guest, #409)
In reply to: The SCO Group would then be in violation of the GPL license - and they do not care by khim
Parent article: SCO readies new Linux licensing program (InfoWorld)

The SCO group has knowingly sold and distributed the GPL'ed kernel, containing the supposed "infringing source". SCO executives have publicly claimed that they knew of the existance of the supposed "infringing source" for many months before they considered legal action.

To quote Eben Moglen, General Counsel to the FSF, in the FSF Statement on SCO v. IBM

But even if SCO could show that some portions of its UNIX source code were copied into the kernel, the claim of copyright infringement would fail, because SCO has itself distributed the kernel under GPL. By doing so, SCO licensed everyone everywhere to copy, modify, and redistribute that code. SCO cannot now turn around and argue that it sold people code under GPL, guaranteeing their right to copy, modify and redistribute anything included, but that it somehow did not license the copying and redistribution of any copyrighted material of their own which that code contained.

Any attempt to introduce a sublicense would open The SCO Group to potential legal action from any and all individuals or organizations, including IBM,HP, who hold copyright over parts of the same Linux kernel SCO have distributed. Such an attempt to limit downstream rights could result in The SCO Group being potentially liable for damage claims from everyone who currently uses the same linux source.

Remember that The SCO Group's own Unix offering relies on many GPL's components. The SCO Group's violation of the GPL license of the kernel would grant the right for any the copyright holders of those components to file an injunction to prevent the SCO distributing SAMBA,CDRecord,Squid and most importantly the entire GNU GCC toolchain and libraries, all vital components for a modern Unix system.

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