Quoting Mike P:$CO's Unix Sys V incorporates BSD codes in violation of BSD license.I'm wondering (1) what code, (2) where do you know that from, and (3) which clause of the BSD licence this violates?
Please, I'm no lawyer, just a linux fan ;)
Anyway, I'll try to provide answers as best I can:
1. Parts of 4.3 BSD was incorporated to Unix System V (The exact parts that were copied was not stated, apparently sealed in the judicial records).
2. OSI position paper
"...AT&T, SCO's predecessor in interest, took code from BSD Unix into System V, removing copyrights and attributions in violation of the Berkeley license... ... SCO neglects to mention that those rights had been substantially impaired before its acquisition of the ancestral Bell Labs source code. There was a legal action in 1992-1993, in which Unix Systems Laboratories and Novell (SCO's predecessors in interest) sued various parties including the University of California at Berkeley and Berkeley Systems Design, Inc. for alleged copyright infringement, trade secret disclosures, and trademark violations with regard to the release of the open-source 4.4BSD operating system[11].
The suit was settled after AT&T's request for an injunction blocking distribution of BSD was denied in terms that made it clear the judge thought BSD likely to win its defense. The University of California then threatened to countersue over license violations by AT&T and USL. It seems that from as far back as before 1985, the historical Bell Labs codebase had been incorporating large amounts of software from the BSD sources. The University's cause of action lay in the fact that AT&T, USL and Novell had routinely violated the terms of the BSD license by removing license attributions and copyrights.
The exact terms of final settlement, and much of the judicial record, were sealed at Novell's insistence. The key provisions are, however, described in Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable, [McKusick99]. Only three files out of eighteen thousand in the distribution were found to be the licit property of Novell and removed. The rest were ruled to be freely redistributable, and continue to form the basis of the open-source BSD distributions today."
3. Clauses violated:
BSD license
"Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer."
"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."
Although the infringement was not committed by $CO, the very fact that their alleged "IP" contains copyright violations itself drastically reduces their chance of legally proving ownership to all OS derived from Sys V. The USL vs Berkely records will surely be used in the current $CO vs IBM case.
At this point, $CO looks like a loser in the case, not to mention the countersuits that will follow. =)
-- Mike P -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
