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This will never endThis will never endPosted Nov 21, 2003 11:07 UTC (Fri) by jneves (subscriber, #2859)Parent article: SCO update Maybe it's just a worst case scenario, but yesterday a question was raised in my head: "Ok, SCO goes down, who keeps the Unix copyrights?" At first I thought there was going to be an auction or negotiation where Microsoft, Sun, IBM and SGI would attempt to buy them. But then I recalled the deals with Boies and partners. "What if they keep the Unix copyrights for themselves?" Maybe it's a bit of every geeks' lawyer paranoia, but for me it would be the worst case scenario: a litigation team, with no business whatsoever in the IT business, with strong connections to Microsoft, having the Unix copyright. Talk about a bad dream...
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This will never end Posted Nov 27, 2003 12:41 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] My hope is that SCO goes down with man and mouse by a judge who declaires Unix PD. After all, AT&T wasn't able to show that Unix had trade secret or copyright value during the BSD case, and got away to keep it only by settling that case. They'll find that most of Unix is identical to BSD (SCO will help them by suing BSD as well), and that's because most of Unix really is BSD. That's not illegal, but from a copyright point of view, you can't claim copyright for something that's mostly written by others. So Unix itself would be subject to the BSD license.
This will never end Posted Nov 27, 2003 13:07 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] IBM suspects that SCO Unix and Unixware contains GPL (from IBM's contributions to linux) code.They have asked the judge to enforce the GPL, namely put all of SCO's code in those two programs under the GPL. If SCO have put a "escape clause" somewhere so that legal ownership of Unix and Unixware disappears somewhere else when SCO loses, I can see the judge agreeing with IBM :-) So any customer with a Unix source licence will be able to get their hands on the Unix/Unixware source, and PROVIDED they are careful not to infringe the stuff that's "copyright someone else", they'll be able freely to pass all SCO's code around as they see fit :-) Cheers,
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