Derived work?

Posted May 31, 2003 17:30 UTC (Sat) by chel (guest, #11544)
Parent article: SCO's conference call

In the conference call several times the term "derived works" is used.
To understand this one should know the way source licenses in the old days worked. Sometimes in the contract there was a clause that the contractant gave the owner of the source some rights on modifications and enhancements made by the contractant.
The extent of these rights depends on the text of the license contract.
This could give SCO some rights on developments made by IBM and used in conjunction with System V code. These developments are called "derived works".
A twisted mind could say the JFS IBM contributed to Linux is a "derived work". The mind should be very twisted, as the Linux JFS is a port from the OS2 JFS http://oss.software.ibm.com/developer/opensource/jfs/project/pub/faq.txt and SCO is still promoting JFS as "JFS (Journaled File System Developed by IBM)" in their oct 2002 document https://www.caldera.com/developers/training/unitedlinux/Developer_web_2B-3.ppt

If the claim includes "derived works" and even the JFS, this would be a strong promotion for GPL software. The automatic transfer of rights on software you write looks to me a form of slavery. A 1B SCO claim on IBM for software written by IBM would be a complete twisted interpretation of the term "Intellectual Property"