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OSDL Position Paper on SCO and Linux

Posted by michael on from the mincing-words dept.

cshabazian writes "The OSDL has released a position paper raising serious questions about SCO Group's threatened litigation against end users of Linux. The position paper, which casts doubt on SCO's position, was authored by one of the world's leading legal experts on copyright law as applied to software, Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University."

10 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. Users liable? Someone thinks so. by Derek · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I posted this comment in an earlier article on the same issue, but it is also relevant here. According to Melise Blakeslee (a partner with the law firm McDermott, Will & Emery),

    "Users meanwhile need to understand that Linux enduser license agreements are an 'as is' contract, meaning Linux users aren't protected from copyright or intellectual-property infringement claims..."

    Quoted from the July 28th edition of Information Week magazine in an Article by Larry Greenmeier titled "Sco Group Threatens Users in Linux Fight" p.24 -- sorry, I couldn't find a link online.

    Agree with it or not, at least one lawyer thinks users could be liable. -Derek

  2. Re:SCO is plainly lying by Tirel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We all know they're lying, the question now is what are they getting out of it? Do they get a deal with MS? Do they hope IBM will buy them? Do they just hope to raise share prices for a while? All of the above? It's high time for things to clear up really.

  3. my thoughts on his main three arguments by BobTheLawyer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1. where's the evidence of infringement?

    this is the key argument: without evidence of infringement they clearly have no claim.

    2. you can't charge a license fee to users

    this has to be correct: if there has been a breach of SCO's copyright then SCO has a right to sue the Linux distributors. It has no right to charge or sue Linux users.

    3. SCO distributed the allegedly-copyrighted work themselves, and have therefore licensed it under GPL

    I'm not sure it's no simple. SCO will no doubt argue that, at the time, they didn't realise the source contained their copyrighted material. This raises the question of whether you can be legally bound by the GPL if you don't realise what you were licensing. This is a tricky question under English law; I've no idea what the US position is but doubt it is straightforward.

  4. Re:SCO is plainly lying by TopShelf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interesting indeed. Insiders have sold ~125,000 shares since late June (with no purchases), when it poked through the $10 mark for the first time in over two years. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of SCO's future from their own leadership!

    --
    Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
  5. Bias? by grennis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You guys always complain about bias when the Gartner Group etc., releases a study about how Microsoft is better at this or that.

    But I don't see anyone complaining that the OSDL certainly has a vested interested here and is hardly to be expected to provide an unbiased report.

    Discuss.

    1. Re:Bias? by Kismet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Do you see something in Moglen's paper that isn't certifiably factual?

      Do you see something in Moglen's paper that ignores SCO's side of the argument?

      It's hard to be unbiased when the only available facts are so one-sided.

      Some people like to ignore facts if it helps them look less "biased," because facts tend to lead the mind to certain conclusions. I mean, we wouldn't want actual critical thought at the expense of giving both parties equal benefit of the doubt, would we?

      So far, I have yet to see one single, tangible, FACT from SCO that would support their claims in the least amount. And yet I see all sorts of "journalism" that lends credibility to SCO's claims for the sake of "unbiased" reporting.

  6. Conspiracy theory! by Urkki · · Score: 5, Interesting
    What I'd find interesting is, who the hell are idiot enough to buy SCO stock...? Or gambling, "ok, there's 0.1% chance SCO will win, and then their stock price will really go up"?

    Or, is it maybe some pension fund or something like that with corrupt management "investing" in the SCO stock, helping their PHB pals at SCO?

    Conspiracy!
    (Well, that would make more sense than most other explanations...)

  7. Re:No, this has *nothing* to do with that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Who modded this guy up? You, sir, are talking out of your ass. The person who developed the RCU code for Dynix is not the same who did the work on Linux. The RCU implementation you see on Linux was done by 3 engineers, none of them having anything to do with the original Sequent employee. I know, I was at Sequent at that time.

    Brett Glass

  8. Let's put and end to this. by demigod · · Score: 3, Interesting
    SCO claims seem to be based on the fact AIX and Linux are derived works of AT&T UNIX, to which they hold the copyright.

    Isn't it just as valid to say AT&T UNIX is a derived work of MULTICS?

    Who owns the copyright to MULTICS, Honeywell.

    So if Honeywell would just start send letters to all of SCO's customers (both of them) demanding they buy a license...

    --
    "The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
    Major Major
  9. Re:No, this has *nothing* to do with that by Wyzard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Other posters seem to have raised some doubts about the accuracy of your facts, but assuming what you say is true, you're still mixing up patent and copyright.

    but, and here's the thing, Sequent developed it's tech independent of Unix. RCU and that stuff would work on any modern OS's kernel. They published their papers and filed their patents before they implemented it in their own version of Unix.

    Not having read the document myself, I can't say this with absolute certainty, but AT&T's license clause saying they get the rights to any changes you make to Unix sounds like it's talking about copyright rights. If that's the case, then SCO would own the copyright on the lines of code belonging to Sequent's Unix RCU implementation, not the patent rights to the RCU technology itself. Therefore, SCO cannot claim that the Sequent programmer doesn't have the right to re-implement the technology in Linux; what they can claim is that he doesn't have the right to take the implementation he wrote for Unix and copy that code into Linux.

    So the question is, is the Linux RCU implementation an independent rewrite, or a copy of the original implementation? Unfortunately, we won't know unless SCO shows us their implementation. But in any case the fact that the technology was developed and patented before it was implemented in Unix is irrelevant.