SCO Panel discussion at AUUG
Groggy reports from the AUUG Conference:
Kieran O'Shaughnessy of SCO Australia came along for a panel session with Con Zymaris and myself. Not surprisingly, the session was well attended. Kieran brought out the party line with some ridiculous number of claimed lines of infringement in the Linux kernel, so I brought out a display of the BPF code of their second example presented on 18 August, then paged back to the beginning to show the BSD license there. The look on Kieran's face really made my day. He claimed, rather stupidly, that these were just examples of the techniques that they used to find similar code. Greg Rose joined in the fun and pointed out that some of his code, written in 1976 (still at least three years after the first example) had been included in UNIX without his consent, and asked whether Kieran thought he should approach IBM for royalties. Finally I got to do the summing up, where I determined that SCO had done nothing to show any abuse of its rights, but that the code in question had indicated that their code was way out of date, and that it looked likely that they had abused the BSD license (applause).
BSD too, eh? I wish I'd been there.
If this is an example of their technique then their claims of thousands of other infringements seem pretty questionable.
posted Thu 4 Sep 2003 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link
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