Can Novell release Unix as free software?

Posted Apr 1, 2010 13:24 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Can Novell release Unix as free software? by james
Parent article: SCO loses again

Novell vas involved in USL, and bought the rest of it from AT&T way back. So they originally owned all copyrights to Unix (but a lot of Unix wasn't copyrighted, and another large portion belonged to others). Then they sold the "develop and sell licenses to Unix binaries" plus "handle source licencees" business to The Santa Cruz Operation (original SCO). Novell kept the copyrights (and asked for 95% of the royalties on source licenses). The agreement (the infamous APA) stated that in case SCO needed copyrights for their business, Novell would give them to SCO (presumably after finding out whom (if anybody) they belonged to). SCO went along merrily without any need for copyrights, and then sold the Unix business and the SCO name to Caldera (a then Linux distributor), who wanted to integrate Unix and Linux. Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group (SCOX). Along came another set of CxOs to SCOX, and came up with the bright idea of sueing Linux users for using alleged Unix code in Linux. But for that they needed the copyrights, and first asked for them from Novell, and then sued Novell for slander of title because of its pùblic statements that the copyrights hadn't been sold to SCO (and thus landed in SCOX hands).

Now the jury has stated that the copyrights belonged to Novell all along, so Novell is certainly in position to open source them. But there is the snag that Novell might be forced to hand them to SCOX (due to the promise in the APA), but that is higly unlikely: SCOX stated during the trial that they didn't need them for the business they bought originally from SCO, they needed them just for their SCOsource "sue your own customers" program, and that one they also stated in the recent trial is toast by now.

Can Novell release Unix as free software?

Posted Apr 2, 2010 8:54 UTC (Fri) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link] (1 responses)

vonbrand wrote:

So they originally owned all copyrights to Unix (but a lot of Unix wasn't copyrighted, and another large portion belonged to others).

That's sort-of inconsistent. AT&T originally owned all copyrights to the early Unixes, but by the time Novell got involved, as you say, a large part of Unix (by then) belonged to others. So that large part couldn't have belonged to Novell.

They must have had rights to redistribute (for example, the BSD license), but those rights may have been limited (there may have been confidentiality clauses). It's also probable that those rights passed to SCO (under section III of Schedule 1.1(a)): the question just hasn't arisen under the current lawsuits.

Now the jury has stated that the copyrights belonged to Novell all along, so Novell is certainly in position to open source them.

That doesn't follow, either. It's quite possible to own something but be contractually limited as to what you can do with it. The APA is a contract, and the section I pointed to certainly seems to place some limits on what Novell can do with Unix.

Like a lot of the rest of that contract, it's less than clear!

Can Novell release Unix as free software?

Posted Apr 2, 2010 17:04 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

actually, when Unix was initially written the law was not automatic copyrights to anything you wrote, you had to take specific actions to copyright things. For much of the Unix codebase those actions were not taken, and so it was not under copyright, by AT&T or anyone else.

Then there was the Berkley lawsuit, which showed that large portions of the Unix codebase was under copyright by Berkley, not by AT&T.

the situation of who owned what is _far_ from being clear, even before AT&T sold it.