Ian Lance Taylor's visit to SCO
Linux Journal has a report from Ian Lance Taylor who signed the SCO NDA and got to hear some more details about their case, although not to actually inspect the source.
As I previously predicted, Ian thinks it all comes down to the definition of "derivative work". I don't know of any absolutely clear legal definition of this for software. As a matter of commonsense I would not think that any software built on top of Unix counts as a derivative work of Unix. In any case the later letter amending the contract seems fairly clear that IBM's new work (such as RCU, JFS, etc) remains owned by IBM.
Here, we come to the meat of the issue: has code clearly derived from Unix been incorporated into Linux? Unfortunately, SCO was willing to show me only one example. I was shown a source file Sontag said was from SVR4, which was compared to a source file from Linux. The identical portions of the code were highlighted. There were indeed substantial similarities in the code: very similar comment text, the same variable names, the same algorithm. There also were some differences, but it seemed quite plausible that both pieces of code came from the same source.
SCO refused to show me the revision history of the Unix file. I pointed out this made it impossible to judge the order of derivation; SCO agreed, and said it was a matter of discovery for the court case. SCO said it is confident the code had not appeared in BSD and was developed internally at AT&T and successors.
IBM is a past master of the IP extortion strategy. For example, see this Forbes article about IBM's shakedown of Sun in Sun's early days. For SCO to attack IBM using IP is somewhat like trying to eat a live tiger.
I'm not really in favour of bloodsports or lawsuits, but I'd pay $100 to see Darl McBridge try to eat a live tiger.
(That Forbes article is actually quite worth reading.)
posted Sat 21 Jun 2003 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link
Archives 2008: Apr Feb 2007: Jul May Feb Jan 2006: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun Jan 2005: Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2004: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2003: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.