[Am-info] Byte: SCO Owns Your Computer

[Roy Bixler]

It's looking more and more like the SCO vs. IBM case is likely to have
effect on the IT industry even outside of the open source world.  The
following article:

SCO Owns Your Computer
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=8276/byt1055784622054/0616_marshall.html

is based on an interview with SCO VP Chris Sontag.

Here are some interesting passages:

    In the beginning was AT&T Bell Labs, staffed by a benevolent team
    of PhDs and research scientists. AT&T produced this really neat
    operating system 'System V' which computer manufacturers wanted to
    license and use. Everybody was happy to sign tough contracts with
    these benevolent scientists' licenses which deeded all derivative
    works back to AT&T, licenses that covered all "methods" and
    "concepts" of operating systems. But now those licenses are owned
    by SCO and its team of lawyers who are certain that AIX and all
    the other derivative IXs belong to SCO. And the company now wants
    royalties from users of all these operating systems' especially
    Linux.

So, it's not just about Linux but practically every Unix because, as
SCO's reasoning goes, it all derived from AT&T code and, due to SCO's
contracts, SCO has absolute veto power over how that code is used.
Even BSD isn't given a clean bill of health by them:

    "But what about BSD?" I asked. Sontag responded that there "could
    be issues with the [BSD] settlement agreement," adding that
    Berkeley may not have lived up to all of its commitments under the
    settlement.

Microsoft could be affected too, even though they have a licence from
SCO:

    "But I thought that Microsoft had signed a license agreement?"
    "No," Sontag said. Microsoft merely licensed an "applications
    interface layer."

So apparently SCO's case depends less on whether any code copying was
done than on whether SCO's contracts say what they claim they say and
whether they are enforcable.  I can only say that, if SCO's claims are
upheld in court, then they got a stunningly good bargain out of their
few million dollar purchase of Unix rights.

R.