[Am-info] SCO Agrees IBM Owns AIX, JFS, NUMA, RCU Copyrights!!

[Roy Bixler]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 03:48:18PM +0400, Hans Reiser wrote:
> You can own exclusive rights without owning the copyrights.  The person 
> doing that interview did not listen very carefully to what SCO was 
> saying, and was not a lawyer, or he would have heard it more exactly.

Yes, SCO claims that IBM violated its contract with them by open
sourcing technologies that they had already contributed to Unix.  But,
however, in their ongoing FUD campaign, they bring up the issue of
copyrights.  They say that they have registered the SysV copyrights,
but this has nothing to do with the dispute with IBM and more to do
with trying to scare Linux users into buying a "licence" from them.  I
put "licence" in quotes because, under the GPL, SCO is not allowed to
sublicence or further restrict the rights of Linux users.  By doing
so, they lose the right to distribute Linux.  To reiterate, what SCO
is doing in public bears little relationship to exercise of their
legal rights.

> I wish I understood the claim by SCO well enough to know whether it has 
> substance, and to know whether I should avoid any code they lay claim 
> to, and what code they lay claim to, but it looks like nobody will know 
> the claim and the code before the trial, and that is the way SCO wants it.

SCO's current claim is strictly a contract dispute with IBM and the
rest is strictly saber rattling at this point.  To put the contract
dispute in perspective, suppose that you signed an agreement with
Microsoft for them to give you the specifications to make ReiserFS
work on Windows and to allow you to distribute Windows with ReiserFS
bundled in.  Further suppose that you have not developed the Linux
version yet.  In return, Microsoft gets the rights to the ReiserFS
source code and to use ReiserFS in their version of Windows as well.
You want to develop ReiserFS for Windows, but understandably have
qualms about signing such an agreement with Microsoft.  After all, you
want to retain ownership of your product, ReiserFS.  When you ask for
clarification, Microsoft agrees to your stipulation and the agreement
is signed.

Everything goes fine and soon you develop an open source version of
ReiserFS for Linux.  A couple of years later, however, Microsoft sues
you for releasing your open source version of ReiserFS claiming that
you have damaged their Windows business by doing so and that it
violated the contract you signed with them to develop ReiserFS under
Windows.  This matches what SCO has done pretty closely.  Key
questions are: does Microsoft or SCO have an exclusive right to use
the ReiserFS or IBM source code?  Is that source code to be considered
a derivative work of Windows or Unix?  Or does the source code
constitute an independent work which is not derivative of any
particular operating system?  Although I am not a lawyer, I can guess
that, from the way SCO is playing up its case in public and has so far
avoiding doing anything, like requesting a temporary injunction, which
would require the judge to make a ruling, SCO has a weak case.
Microsoft would have a stronger case in the hypothetical situation
above because, unlike SCO, they never had their own Linux distribution
which they continued to support even after they filed suit!

R.

-- 
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands
what will sell.
                -- Confucius