Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 22:01 UTC (Tue) by deater (subscriber, #11746)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by BrucePerens
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

so by your argument, the various BSDs are still derivative of the original AT&T codebase, despite all of the AT&T code being removed? Enough so that whoever owns the UN*X copyright these days could re-assert ownership rights?

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 22:22 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

so by your argument, the various BSDs are still derivative of the original AT&T codebase, despite all of the AT&T code being removed?

There are a lot of circumstances to the AT&T and BSD case that don't apply here. AT&T didn't maintain their copyright correctly, in a different legal context than we have today. There was no copyright by default back then, as we later got from a Berne copyright convention. They didn't properly assert their copyright. So, when they went to enforce against BSD, they found they could not do so for reasons that had nothing to do with the nature of derivative works. And Ray Noorda brokered a settlement between the parties (yes, the SCO Ray Noorda, before he went senile). We might otherwise have no BSD today.