out there
out there
Posted Aug 19, 2003 16:47 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)In reply to: Didn't Caldera/SCOX open source SYS V v7 by rfunk
Parent article: Heise reports from SCO Forum
rfunk said, "we have to go back to a defense of 'that code has been out there for years anyway'".
That doesn't work: copyright isn't the same as trademark. Rather, we (IBM, really) will need to rely on the Regents of U.C vs. USL agreement granting U.C. full rights to that code as it appears in 2.11 BSD and up. UCB dropped the advertising clause requirement sometime after that. SCO has no proprietary rights to anything that appears in the last BSD release. This is not (as is often reported) because they didn't write much of it, but rather because they were in such hot water over having stolen huge amounts of BSD code, they had to give up rights to the code they had written, or lose the right to sell UNIX at all.
Posted Aug 19, 2003 17:33 UTC (Tue)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link]
Good point, though actually I was thinking trade secret, not trademark.
And SCO has been including trade secret misappropriation as part of their
accusations, though it's not clear to me which one they're thinking of
with this code.
Except as Bruce has pointed out, we don't know the full terms of the
agreement. Are you saying that UC won full rights to everything in
2.11BSD? That's the first I've heard of that.
Yes, but this code doesn't appear in the last BSD release. (2.11 is
quite a bit older than 4.4.)
out there
That doesn't work: copyright isn't the same as
trademark.
Rather, we (IBM, really) will need to rely on the Regents of U.C vs. USL
agreement granting U.C. full rights to that code as it appears in 2.11 BSD
and up.
UCB dropped the advertising clause requirement sometime after that. SCO
has no proprietary rights to anything that appears in the last BSD
release.