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USL vs BSDI Documents
Dibyendu Majumdar writes "Dennis Ritchie has posted some court papers from the lawsuit by USL against BSDI about UNIX intellectual property. Some of the SCO claims, such as identical comments in the code, etc. also occur in the claims made by USL. Interesting read in the context of SCO vs IBM case."
IANAL, but is USL SOL if SCO says BFD about IBM's IP?
Ahem..."I Am Not A Lawyer" but is USL "Shit Out of Luck" if SCO says "Big Fucking Deal" about IBM's "Intellectual Property".
P.S. Google "acronym lookup"
I think it's time you realise that today's SCO is not the same SCO of 10 years ago.
Today's SCO is just Caldera with a different name. That bold portion does not refer to the modern SCO.
Please take note of this in the future.
BSDI's product was far from "free as in beer". As of 3 years ago, BSD-OS Internet Server sold at 999$ apiece.
On a side note, both SCO & USL are US companies, so they would love to charge 0.92 USD, not 1 Euro a glass.
i had a sig, once..
Bzzt, sorry. C++ is an ANSI standard, and ANSI have some pretty tough rules regarding standards submissions. SCO might "own" C++, but they don't own the C++ ANSI standard.
I think it would have to be launched by the copyright owner of the code in question. The only problem is that we don't have the SCO code to examine and determine who the copyright owner is. To get the SCO code, it would most likely have to be subpoenaed and then the examiners would be faced with the NDA vs. tainting conundrum.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Um.. Read the post again. It's not a MozillaZine interview, it's a MozillaQuest "interview". MozillaQuest has a long history of BS, so take everything you read there with a gigantic grain of salt.. Why hasn't SCO's claim to C++ been reported elsewhere since March 4 when this was posted?
Personally, I think that a claim to C++ would have a much wider impact than a claim to SCO code being put into Linux, were it true. Most UNIX/Linux code is still written in C, but the primary language in the Windows world is C++. (well.. MS C++)
End of line..
He's probably talking about Cfront. Never expect a suit to know the difference between a standard and an implementation :)
Cfront was the first C++ implementation. It worked by translating C++ code to C (in fact, it started out as a simple preprocessor), and as a result it has all kinds of problems with fancier C++ constructs, such as exceptions, STL, and inline functions. According to Mozilla's portability guidelines, the SCO and HP C++ compilers are still based on it.
I think, maybe SCO don't care what happened with BSD.
Perhaps I am totally misunderstanding their comments but I get the impression SCO seems to think they own C++ programming languages anyway.
As to this case, SCO now allege that IBM's support for Linux is killing Unix, but not too long ago, SCO discussed Unix's feature in their SEC filings.
Meanwhile, definitely worth checking out, there's a new S-3 filing by SCO
I'm no expert on these types of documents, so could be wrong in understanding it, but:
I'm pretty sure that is a stock option - he has not bought any yet.
Instead he has been granted the right to buy 45000 shares at $10.25 on 6/24/2004. As he is a brand new director, this is presumably part of his compensation package.
If SCO stock is worth more than $10.25 when the option vests, he makes money
If SCO stock is worth less than $10.25, the option is basically useless
I think the same general rules would apply if SCO is bought out.
I am not sure whether he retains the option if he leaves the company before the June 2004 date.
Personally, I don't think he got a great deal. If I were Skousen, I would have asked for 0.001 options vesting immediately (or in months not a year).
BSDI agreed to substitute a port of the University of California's in a release which became known as 4.4 BSD(Lite) for BSD/386.
Just as a side note, BSDI WAS based on 4.4BSD-Lite. As was 386BSD (which birthed both FreeBSD and NetBSD). After the settlement, BSDI, FreeBSD and NetBSD all restarted development using 4.4BSD-Lite2 per the agreement. For FreeBSD this was the dividing line between the 1.X and 2.X series.
With the advent of the release of 32V, people could once again distribute FreeBSD 1.X (why, I don't know!)
BWP
In November, 1994 I was a plaintiff's expert witness in the
.... essentially putting
case of Automated Securities Clearance(ASC) vs. Securities Application
Applications (SAI), Inc. We (ASC) contended that SAI had misappropriated
trade secrets by taking source code of the popular BRASS Nasdaq trading
system and developing a competing product.
By examining the source code of the 2 systems, I was able to find
a very small amount (several hundred lines out of about 500,000) of
identical code, some with identical comments, formatting, etc.
However, in our case, we successfully argued that this small amount wasn't
the extent of the damage, rather it was the dna fingerprint that
proved that the original BRASS code was used as a "reference" for
the competing product -- and that the extent of the misappropriation
was well beyond the actual duplicate lines shown as evidence (especially
since the identical lines were at a low-level infrastructure layer
which we argued was necessary for anything else to work...)
The judge agreed -- imposing an injunction on SAI, and as punitive
damages imposing an additional injunction
SAI out of business. The case isn't 100% relevant given some pretty
bad conduct of the SAI folks (ex-ASC employees) and the judge's finding
that they had been "disingenuous" on the stand, but it does provide some
precendent for small amounts of code being used to 'prove' a larger
infringement.
In particular, the judge found that identical comments do have value --
representing 'trial and error', evolution, or labor that went into the
original and that was used to advantage by the copier. This holds
true even for copied 'dead code' that is never even executed.
IANAL, but those interested should consult the records of the
Superior Court of NJ, Chancery Division, Hudson County, Docket # C-28-94.
In a strange coincidence, the lawyers for the defendant (SAI) were
"Crummy, Del Deo, Dolan...." -- the same firm that was on the other side
for the USL vs. BSDI case (I just noticed from Dennis Ritchie's links...)
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