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SCO Group Hires Boies After All
pitr256 writes "So it seems the SCO Group has decided to
hire infamous Anti-Microsoft lawyer David
Boies after all. This comes upon reversal of the SCO Group statement
according to Chief Executive Darl McBride of having not engaged Mr. Boies
to take legal action against our fellow Linux vendors. Now, CNet
News is reporting that not only is SCO Group investigating the Linux vendors
but that it is also going to investigate Windows, Mac OS X, and the BSD derivatives. So if your technology can't win on price
and performance, break out the lawyers and sue everyone. Does anyone else see
this as the end of SCO (Caldera) like I do? I certainly will never use anything from them ever again."
FreeBSD includes software compatibility layers (such as Linux, etc.) that also includes some System V shims and code that could be targetted by SCO. I believe the kernel module that could be in question is svr4.ko along with the stuff under /usr/src/sys/svr4.
NetBSD and OpenBSD may also have the same code or code derivatives in their base system's source.
I believe it was 4.4Lite that was the result of the BSD vs. AT&T court case, which in itself was a re-write to be "clean" of any AT&T source code... or at least clean enough for AT&T to allow it's distribution. I could be wrong though...
SCO owns the IP for System V. Linux uses several concepts from the System V design, not the least of which is the Linux init system which is a direct take off of the System V method.
SCO is not going after every Linux vendor, only those distributing the two libraries without SCO's permission.
To me, this is all just FUD, and is being blown WAY out of proportion.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You might be able to make some far-fetched trademark argument about Unix look-and-feel, but what a patent covers is a set of succinct (or sometimes not-so-succinct) claims. Ie, "A system, with provision for input and output to a terminal, that ...."
I'm unsure of what exactly SCO's patents cover, but many of the fundamental characteristics of unix look and feel are more than 20 years old, e.g. the patents would be expired by now.
We might have to worry about some things, like System V-style shared memory, possibly being infringing. But it's not really possible to get a patent on the concept of a "unix-like" OS.
patents only last for 17 years from issuance of patent, or 20 years from application for patent, whichever expires first.
Actually, it's whichever expires last according to 35 USC 154(c)(1).
But if Rep. Mary Bono has her way, she'll probably introduce a bill like this to "harmonize" patent terms with copyright terms.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Note entirely true. 4.3BSD NET2 had some USL code in it. That's what the 1995 lawsuit was about. The various BSD projects replaced their 4.3NET2 based code with 4.4LITE code which was explicitly covered by the AT&T/UCB agreements. Part of that agreement was that a certain number of files that were alleged to contain USL code were explicitly released under the BSD license.
Chances are good that someone saw these copyright notices and failed to read them far enough:
Notice the "reproduced herein with the permission of" in there.
...Since it makes a lot of things clear.
From the CNET article: "If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
From the O'Reilly link in the parent post: Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed.
Meaning: The reason why those USL copyrights are in OS X is because the code was taken from FreeBSD, which took the code from 4.4BSD-Lite, which had permission to do so from Novell, the owner at the time of the copyrights. That settlement is still legally binding, even if the ownership of the USL code is now SCO. Looks like SCO has no case against the BSDs (nor against MS or Apple, who use BSD code in accordance with the BSD license.) Linux, I wouldn't be sure about, but I always thought Linux never had any AT&T/USL code.