I kind of touched parts of this in the meeting (or planned to). One thing that this article is talking about is copyright infringements. SCO is not claiming any copyright infringements (they don't have the copyrights), but rather that IBM has illegally inserted SCO's Intellectual Property into the 2.4 and 2.5/2.6 kernels. Novell has not transferred the UNIX copyrights to SCO.
There are some real unclear legal arguments about how all this fits into with the GPL.
I think we have to add some good summaries and option sections to what I started. Any help from you folks would be great. Email me corrections or additions (in text with any referring links listed). The section I wrote is mainly a time line and its pretty rough right now. I have not even done a final proofreading of it, but I have been trying to be real careful about listing events with correct dates and quotations.
http://sclinux.org/SCO.htm
-----Original Message----- From: Ted Kat. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 2:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sclug-general] Gnu' says sco is in violation!
Hey there,
Brion your presentation was very well put together, but i think it left out a very good point some of the GNU people came up with,
<snip http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sco-statement.html>
"Moreover, there are straightforward legal reasons why SCO's assertions concerning claims against the kernel or other free software are likely to fail. As to its trade secret claims, which are the only claims actually made in the lawsuit against IBM, there remains the simple fact that SCO has for years distributed copies of the kernel, Linux, as part of GNU/Linux free software systems. Those systems were distributed by SCO in full compliance with GPL, and therefore included complete source code. So SCO itself has continuously published, as part of its regular business, the material which it claims includes its trade secrets. There is simply no legal basis on which SCO can claim trade secret liability in others for material it widely and commercially published itself under a license that specifically permitted unrestricted copying and distribution.
The same fact stands as an irrevocable barrier to SCO's claim that ``Linux'' violates SCO's copyright on UNIX source code. Copyright, as the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized, covers expressions, not ideas. Copyright on source code covers not how a program works, but only the specific language in which the functionality is expressed. A program written from scratch to express the function of an existing program in a new way does not infringe the original program's copyright. GNU and Linux duplicate some aspects of UNIX functionality, but are independent bodies, not copies of existing expressions. But even if SCO could show that some portions of its UNIX source code were copied into the kernel, the claim of copyright infringement would fail, because SCO has itself distributed the kernel under GPL. By doing so, SCO licensed everyone everywhere to copy, modify, and redistribute that code. SCO cannot now turn around and argue that it sold people code under GPL, guaranteeing their right to copy, modify and redistribute anything included, but that it somehow did not license the copying and redistribution of any copyrighted material of their own which that code contained. " </snip>
I wonder if SCO's lawyers thought of this?
===== Ted Katseres
