even without the advertising clause

Posted Aug 19, 2003 17:52 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421)
In reply to: SCO's copyrights by rfunk
Parent article: Why SCO won't show the code

Even without the advertising clause, the BSD license contains:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

and essentially every other license contains a similar condition. IANAL, but it seems like there is a good chance that this code has been used illegally in the kernel if SGI replaced the copyright notice with its own. It's hard to imagine substantial claims of damages, of course.

(Note that it was a proprietary software company that did this, moreover, not the horrible hordes of hairy hackers. But, to be fair, I think that very few programmers are careful about this sort of thing.)

The code's being published in a book doesn't remove its copyrighted status or allow re-distribution, by the way, so that argument is a red herring (except regarding trade-secret claims).