[ale] SCO going after Red Hat/Suse next....

[Fulton Green]

IIRC, SCO is claiming that certain performance-related sections of code
were lifted virtually verbatim from the original AT&T codebase by IBM's
Linux kernel developers.

SCO currently has ownership of the AT&T codebase, though the "UNIX"
trademark itself is now held by The Open Group.  IBM, "back in the day",
had bought a license for the source.  I believe the legally-binding
agreement was that the source was exclusively for the purpose of
integrating into IBM's closed-source UNIX variant, AIX.

So essentially, SCO is claiming that since IBM included copyrighted,
non-trivial code and algorithms straight from SCO's "original flavor" into
an open-sourced OS, a situation not covered by the original code-sharing
agreement, SCO's IP rights have been violated, and therefore any company
in the business of selling an OS based on a recent Linux kernel needs to
pony up.  They started with IBM since they're profiting from Linux more
than any other technology company (plus the whole code-lifting thing).
SCO had warned that they would be going after the major Linux distros as
well; I just didn't think it'd be happening this soon.

Everyone except for SCO's management (but including some key SCO
investors) seems to agree that it's a ridiculous final-hour grasp at a
revenue stream (a la' Intergraph vs. Intel) before they go under.  It's
unclear, however, just how much, or little, technical merit there is to
the lawsuit.  Even if they had a legit case, IBM is clearly the 800 lb.
gorilla in this matter.  Early speculation was that it might be cheaper
for IBM to simply buy out SCO.

OTOH, the *BSDs all emanate from the Berkeley UNIX distro, which started
out as "AT&T code + cool extensions", but had divested itself of any Ma
Bell-related IP before the all-too-many code forks happened.

On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 07:03:46PM -0400, John Wells wrote:
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/23/1925259&mode=thread&tid=123
> 
> I'm a little confused....SCO says they own the Unix OS.  Does this include
> the Berkley children, etc.?  I thought those were public domain.
> 
> I guess a review of the history of *nix would answer this question, but
> surely someone on the list can save me the time ;-)
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