SCO's new offensive

SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 22, 2003 3:23 UTC (Tue) by euvitudo (subscriber, #98)
Parent article: SCO's new offensive

I would like to know one thing. The following article was posted the other day (I cannot remember whether it was here or /.). But regarless, it presents a few questions that I do not believe have been addressed.

The article is:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-271812.html?legacy=cnet

The background is that Ransom Love answers two questions, each regarding the futures of Caldera Linux, UnixWare, and OpenServer.

I snip a few sentences from his responses. He says:

With UnixWare we can now take Linux to 32-way systems.

and

With the technology we have we want to move into the high end, and the Unix kernel is two to three times more scalable than the current Linux kernel. But there are always trade-offs in putting everything into a single kernel, so what we want is a single-build environment, so we have to create a single application layer.

and

We have more than 2 million installations of OpenServer. The operating system is in maintenance mode now, so there will be no more major enhancements. But what we plan to do is to take the OpenServer technology to Linux, probably with some sort of open-source license but not GNU.

and finally

Our mission is to enable development, deployment and management of a unified Linux and Unix operating system. The goal is to make Linux on Intel the alternative business platform because it is built on open standards.

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Using the snippets above, I conclude that Caldera's whole idea was to transfer code from UnixWare/OpenServer to Linux. This may be a generalization, as I have not had the chance to do more research into the issue.

Now, if Caldera (Ransom Love et al.) had in mind to transfer the newly acquired UnixWare/OpenServer code to Linux, this would solve the issue of the new litigators finding word-for-word copies of code in Linux (hundreds of files?).

My question is thus:

If this is true (which I have no way of proving--Ransom? former employees? current employees? others?), wouldn't this invalidate any claims that the litigators (McBride, Sontag, Boies, and co-horts) have on Linux?

If the code was released to Linux, would this not also imply that the code was also released through the GPL, and that SCO no longer have proprietary rights to the code?

Also, do the litigators know about any copying that occurred (given it did occur) before they decided to threaten every Linux user on the planet?

Are these legitimate questions, or am I out in left field?

Thanks for reading,
--Phil

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