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

[Hans Reiser]

Roy Bixler wrote:

>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.
>
No, it effects the amount and type of damages they can sue for.

>
>  
>
>>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. 
>
No, it does not, their contract seems to give them exclusive rights, as 
I understand it.  What you described in your example does not involve an 
assignment of exclusive rights.

> 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.
>
>  
>


-- 
Hans