No escape from SCO [LWN.net]

Here at LWN, we start each week in the hope that we'll be able to keep SCO off the front page. Each week, the company finds some way to make that impossible. This time around, there are two separate episodes which require attention, and thus two articles to look at them.

First, we look at the interesting claim from SCO's lawyers that the GPL is not enforceable, since it is preempted by federal copyright law. This would appear to be a very difficult argument to back up, as has been established by a number of people. But a sinister agenda may yet lurk behind this goofy attack on the GPL; it bears watching.

Then, of course, there is our article on SCO's disastrous (for them) demonstration of "stolen" code. This article is responsible for the busiest day LWN's server has ever experienced. As this Weekly Edition goes to "press," this situation is still developing. SCO has not, yet, managed a response beyond the one they sent to us:

Attendees at SCO's annual conference, SCOForum, were shown samples of Linux code that were illegally copied from SCO intellectual property. Some Linux proponents are suggesting that SCO has no claim to this code.

Chris Sontag, GM and SVP of SCOsource, said that not only are their assertions incorrect, but the code is absolutely owned by SCO. In fact SCO knows exactly which version of UNIX System V the code came from and which licensee was responsible for illegally contributing it to Linux.

Look for the inevitable "Chris and Darl" teleconference in the near future.

It is worth noting that the inclusion of BSD-licensed code into the Linux kernel without the accompanying copyright notice is, indeed, a copyright violation. It is something that absolutely should not be done; in cases where it has happened, it needs to be fixed. We need to take greater care with the licensing of code that we use.

But this has never been SCO's point. You don't hire brand-name lawyers over a missing attribution; a simple "please restore my copyright" email will do. A missing attribution does not justify billions of dollars in damages, or even a $699 license fee. There may well have been a copyright violation when BSD-licensed code was used without attribution. But SCO has managed to undermine its own case anyway.

(For more information on SCO's Las Vegas slide show, see this article by Bruce Perens, who gained access to the full set of slides presented there).

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No escape from SCO

Posted Aug 21, 2003 10:11 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763) [Link]

....meanwhile, in the conference venue car park:

We took SCO's Chris Sontag outside and pointed to the bright blue sky, the very same sky that SCO claims is green. Sontag said that "Yes, you're all absolutely wrong, and yes, the sky absolutely is green and we can prove it if you sign our NDA. In fact, the sky has been green for a long, long time."

These guys are *deranged*. No matter how serious / obvious the counter-arguments are, they just blast out the same baseless rhetoric. It would be more worrying if it wasn't so comical.

I suspect that the game might be up fairly soon, once the mainstream press (or those whose memories of Enron are still fresh) gets wind of all this. The shares will crash and people will hopefully stop listening to the sad, desperate extortionists.

On the ownership of the BPF code

Posted Aug 21, 2003 15:14 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

So when's the lawsuit by the Regents of the University of California coming? They actually do own some code that SCO is claiming to own. SCO does have to right to incorporate that code in their products, but not to claim that they wrote it originally, and certainly not to threaten people over it. Plus, I suspect that UC could use some money about now.