NOT SCO's copyright ! A letter of reply

Posted Dec 22, 2003 19:45 UTC (Mon) by NZheretic (guest, #409)
Parent article: SCO's copyright letter

The SCO Group cannot expect to win any case based upon application interfaces which it's AT&T, USL and Novell predecessors relased in open standards specifically for the purpose of interoperability.

signal.h, errorno.h,and ioctl are all parts of many released standards including The Open Group and IEEE POSIX Base Specifications and the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 151-2.

Note that The SCO Group does not own the copyrights on any of those standards and it does not own clear title to the copyrights on most of the AT&T Unix base.

From 1989, the then SCO activity pushed for the adoption of the iBCS Intel Binary Compatibility Specifications across *all* i386 Unix vendors

For the benefit of the entire user base, as well as the industry as awhole, SCO encourages all UNIX System vendors for Intel processors to join SCO, USL, Intel, ISC and OSF in supporting the iBCS-2 standard for x86 applications.

In LOTR:ROTK there is a seen where the souls of dead men rise up in mass to totally overwhelm the enemy in anwser to a broken promise. Such a fate awaits the SCO Groups claims.

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Correction and More on standards

Posted Dec 23, 2003 9:41 UTC (Tue) by NZheretic (guest, #409) [Link]

The second to last link is incorrect and should link as

Note that The SCO Group does not own the copyrights on any of those standards and it does not own clear title to the copyrights on most of the AT&T Unix base.

standard MAY !=free :But participants must declare

It is a requirement of the ISO, IEEE and ANSI standards body that participants involved in the development of standards must pre-declare and clearly lable and identify any section of a standard in developent that an implementation would be dependent upon a patent for which royalties must be paid.

Both AT&T and Santa Cruz Operation participated in the development of the POSIX / FIPS 151-X standards and they did not identify any such royalty/patent dependent section as required for Federal endorsed standards.

In terms of copyright, anyone and any organization who has purchased and ISO standard and any subsequent recipients, are free to release implementations based upon those standards.