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A SMALL RANT-LIKE UPDATE ON THE SCO SAGA

Well a little while has passed since the famous SCO = Wankers! post. Many developments have been made since then.

Novell have released a document showing that SCO had repeatedly requested Novell to transfer the remaining licences. Novell also claims that SCO does not own these licences. SCO then produces a document that is an ammendment to the original agreement that shows that SCO do own a bunch more licences. Confused? Whell you bloody should be, The Open Group own a crap load of licences to System V including the UNIX trademark.

This means that IBM's ability to call AIX a Unix system is due to its license from The Open Group. Basically this means that The Open Group sets the standards that everyone has to adhere to in order to have their system called a UNIX.

Also since the original rant SCO has showed the code in question (the IBM Linux question) to some people. These people, who have signed a nondiclosure agreement, have reported that the code shown to them from the SCO source and from the Linux source are indeed identical, right down to the layout and code comments. This would indicate to me that the code was copied from one source to the other. But, which one?

Some time ago SCO began working on Open UNIX. This was about unifying Unix and Linux as "the two have a huge amount in common", said Ransom Love, CEO od Caldera Systems. Mr Love also said "So we are taking both and combining them into one platform." Hmmm...interesting...SCO are now claiming that there is similarity bewteen SCO's UNIX and Linux....of course there is! SCO was doing that with Open UNIX!

But, as always, theres more. SCO have also added the ability to run Linux binaries from within SCO UNIX. It would make sense here that SCO didn't rewrite the UNIX system to have this ability but rather that SCO added the ability to their UNIX. It is just as proable that SCO copied from Linux as it is that someone put UNIX code into Linux. This might seem as though it is OK for SCO to do, well it isn't.

The GNU GPL (General public License), available from gnu.org in plain text format or from opensource.org in a slightly more aesthetically pleasing format), states in its preamble:

...if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code.

To my knowledge SCO dont distribute UNIX under the GPL, otherwise they wouldn't be whining that IBM has placed SCO intellectual property into Linux.

Now, if IBM did not put the code there and SCO claim that they didn't either, then who the hell did? Well there is a theory that UNIX and Linux share a common ancestor, BSD (Berkeley Software Distrbution). UNIX System V Release 4's largest features was that it included features from BSD. This resulted in large amounts of BSD code going into System V. The BSD licence permits this as long as the relevant code is properly attributed. Apparenty this code was not attributed correctly, this information came out in 1992 when AT&T attempted to sue Berkeley. Reportedly AT&T had replaced the BDS copyrights with their own. AT&T had stolen Berkeley code not the other way around.

Surely more thatn one Linux developer had been influenced by BSD. Apparently some people from the BSD project had noticed that significant amount of the Linux kernel was stolen from BSD witout attributions and GPL copyrights added.

So...
Does SCO have a case against IBM for Intellectual Property rights violations?
Does Linux have one over SCo for being the original source?
Does BSD have one on both UNIX and Linux.?

The only thing that is certain is that I shall rant.

INFORMATION SOURCES:
I, Cringeley
OpenSource.org
GNU.org
SlashDot.org: IP Theft in the Linux Kernel

You have just been reading another Brain Fart from Grant
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