Maybe SCO had a point [LWN.net]

Maybe SCO had a point

Posted Aug 22, 2003 9:45 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
In reply to: Maybe SCO had a point by coriordan
Parent article: Maybe SCO had a point

If SCO allowed us to remove the offending code, they wouldn't have a strong case in court.

IANAL, but I believe that to be false. Suppose your neighbor doesn't keep his dog properly secured, and the dog routinely destroys your garden. There are two scenarios:

You tell the neighbor he is causing you damage, but don't give details. The neighbor asks how he can fix the problem, but you refuse to tell him. The damage continues to occur, and you file suit against the neighbor. When you wind up in court, the judge asks you why you wouldn't specify the specific damages so that they could be corrected. The judge awards you damages for the problems that occurred before you notified your neighbor, but not for those that occurred later, because you didn't make a good faith effort to provide enough information for your neighbor to solve the problem.
You tell your neighbor that the dog is getting loose. The neighbor fixes the problem. However, you still want the neighbor to pay for your flowers, and he refuses. You sue, and even though the problem has since been remedied, you present evidence that damage occurred. .The judge awards you the damages.

Note that keeping the nature of the infringement secret, as SCO has been doing, does not in fact help their case at all. The judge will want to know why SCO chose not to reveal the specific Linux code in question (beyond the one trivial example they've shown) so that the Linux copyright holders could take positive action to stop infringing. SCO's claim that revealing the Linux code in question would damage their trade secrets is completely ludicrous; the Linux code is already public, so for SCO to state that lines 1287-1315 of foo.c infringe their copyrights would not damage any trade secrets. They do not have to show the System V code to do this, although it would eventually be necessary to prove infringement if they choose to litigate over the copyright.

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Maybe SCO had a point

Posted Aug 22, 2003 12:06 UTC (Fri) by pto (guest, #5753) [Link]

SCO has already listed (in the recent PowerPoint presentation) that hundreds of files and hundreds of thousands of lines of code are infringing. Knowing what files these are won't help, I'm afraid.

It's like saying your neighbor's dog destroyed your Rolls-Royce, without any proof that any car ever existed. Your neighbor would be right not to pay up. And no judge will award you damages for anything, even justifiable damages, if you've lied about your case.

Maybe SCO had a point

Posted Aug 22, 2003 12:27 UTC (Fri) by sommere (guest, #14168) [Link]

But the hundreds of thousands of lines includes mainly code which IBM, SGI, etc own but MAYBE weren't allowed to contribute under contracts they signed.

If they were allowed to contribute them, then there is no problem. If they weren't then those lines still aren't infringing on copyright claims, only contract claims with those specific companies.

The number of lines lifted directly from SCO's code is probably very small from everything I've read.