Re: SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Diego Calleja [ISO-8859-15] García wrote:

> El Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:52:21 -0400 Michael Bernstein <michael@seven-angels.net> escribió:
>
> > To put it simply, just because they "may,"  - and I say may here simply
> > because we have no evidence to prove their claims but cannot flatly
> > deny them - own the rights to Sys V, does NOT mean they own the right
>
> So they want to sell us something that still hasn't proved....cool.
>

No. They want to sell you something you already own. SCO is the
owner of a non-exclusive license to a 30 year-old operating
system. There are many others who have such a license including
the University of California in Berkeley. Much of Linux was designed
to interface with the API that they published, in a method that
minimizes the changes to a 'C' runtime library. This made porting
of various Unix utilities developed by the students at Berkeley,
relatively easy.  The actual Unix API used by Berkeley, was published
by AT&T in December 1983. It is Called "Unix System V, Release 2.0,
User Reference Manual Including BTL Computer Center Standard and
Local Commands". I have a copy of that two volume ring-bound book.

A "non-exclusive license" means that you you are not the only
person who has been licensed. It's just that simple. In my opinion
there is no way that SCO will ever convince any court that their version
of "non-exclusive" is any different than all the others including,
but not limited to, BSD, Digital, Interactive, Sun, IBM, Microsoft,
Novell, etc. I have read the complaint and they allege that somebody
must have stolen their secrets because nobody could make a version
of Unix good enough for "the enterprise" without their secrets.
So, they contend that they are the only people smart enough to write
software for "the enterprise", whatever that is. Nice trick.

Note that in the complaint against IBM, SCO seeks a jury trial.
I guess they think it's easier to snow a jury than a judge. We'll
see. I think SCO thinks juries are stupid and will treat them
as David and Goliath. I think a jury will treat them like
thieves, instead.

It is instructive to read the annual reports, filed with the
United States Security and Exchange Commission, by many
of the companies that produce software. These reports are
available on the "Web" and the various company's Web Pages
usually have links to recent filings. A quote from a portion
of Novel's 2002 Annual report goes like this; " The software
industry is characterized by frequent litigation regarding
copyright, patent, and other intellectual property rights."

The fact that somebody sues somebody else in the Software
Industry is kind of like having the sun rise in the East.
You get to expect it. Now, back to writing some software
that somebody may claim I stole.............


Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.