SCO Says No Way To a GPL Solaris, Moves Trial Back

penguino writes "Looks like it didn't take long for SCO to formally respond to claims by Sun that it will open source Solaris. According to SCO 'they [Sun] still have licence restrictions that would prevent them from contributing our licensed works wholesale to the GPL'. The company has also released a statement dated June 8 that 'SCO is making a motion to move the scheduled trial date to September 2005 and split IBM's counterclaims into a separate case'. Also quoted is AUUG president and FreeBSD developer Greg Lehey who recommends 'that the best thing for IBM to do would be to print out every single version as requested and send the resultant 20 tonnes or so of paper to SCO. That would keep them quiet for a while'."

Comments

Unfortunately, they're right

[IGnatius T Foobar]

As much as we all hate SCO, unfortunately they are right this time. Solaris is built from the original Unix code. There is a direct descendence here, and SCO is absolutely within its rights to tell Sun that they can't sublicense it (which is essentially what open sourcing the code would do, assuming that it's a DFSG/OSD compliant license).

On the other hand, if Sun is in cahoots with SCO, as some here suggest, then perhaps they are shooting themselves in the collective foot today. Solaris is demonstrably descended from System V -- Sun programmers had all the original code to work from. It only strengthens the contrast between Solaris's development and Linux's development; i.e. the Linux developers did not have access to System V. Perhaps someone will subpoena Solaris code eventually, and show the court what a derivative work would really look like, contrasted with Linux, built from scratch and looking very different.

Incorrect Title

[Omni-Cognate]

SCO haven't moved the trial back. They've requested that the trial be moved back. The judge has taken it under advisement.

20 tonnes of paper

[cynicalmoose]

That's exactly what SCO did to IBM, and IBM successfully got the court to agree that the stuff must be given electronically.

You can't have the cake and eat it.

You would, after all, only do that if you thought that your case was so weak that you couldn't give your opponent fair access.

Re:Sun will Shine at the Big Blue

[turgid]

Agreed, but how much of that "high-end Solaris" is under SCO license restrictions?

Like you say, it is probably none. Plain System V is ancient, and there has been a lot of development at all the big vendors since those days. It's probably a safe bet that Sun owns all of these high-end features in Solaris, since they're not in any other UNIX.

Sun can roll whatever "high-end Solaris" code they have into Linux.

Why bother, when it's already in Solaris? People seem to assume that because various *nixes are similar on the outside that it must be fairly straight forward to grab code from one and put it in another. Code bases have diverged so much in the last 15 years, that this is not the case. The POSIX interface to the kernels may be similar enough, but what's going on inside is radically different. Don't forget that internally Linux is nothing like a Syatem V or derivative, so any serious porting takes a lot of effort. It's a whole very large and interesting subject in itself, and one I have barely scratched the surface of...

or are they

[not_a_product_id]

and SCO is absolutely within its rights to tell Sun

Slow down there friend. There's actually quite a lot of doubt (seeGroklaw) about whether or not SCO even has any rights over the Unix code. I believe that's the basis of their current legal tussle with Novell.

Judge denies SCO any delay

[brett_sinclair]

This story is a bit old already. See groklaw.