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SCO Claims Ownership of ELF To Court

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-the-keelber-kind dept.

l2718 writes "In the most recent punch-counterpunch of the SCO v. IBM case, IBM is claiming that SCO is trying to vastly expand their claims beyond what they alleged in their list of material allegedly misused by IBM filed last December, using their expert reports. For example, two years ago we covered SCO's claim to own ELF, the main executable format of Linux. Apparently they are have finally made the same claim to a court of law, after the deadline for making such claims. From IBM's memorandum: 'The final disclosures identify 19 Linux files relating to the ELF specification, as well as excerpts from several specification documents. Dr. Cargill far exceeds this claims ... asserting infringement of the entire ELF format ... also ... for the first time, claims to the ELF magic number.'"

2 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. They just don't give up. by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ok, let's see here. The ELF format is part of the System V ABI specification. The System V specification was owned by USL, and is now custodianed by the OpenGroup. ELF was included because of the original licensing statement made by the TIS Committee:

    The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby.


    Who was this TIS Committee that dared give away SCO's property?! Why, SCO themselves. Err, actually, it was Absoft, Autodesk, Borland International
    Corporation, IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Lahey, Lotus Corporation, MetaWare
    Corporation, Microtec Research, Microsoft Corporation, Novell Corporation, The Santa Cruz
    Operation, and WATCOM International Corporation. Considering the number of companies that ownership was split across, one has to wonder: Did SCO ask permission from their partners before filing suit over technology that they (nee, Taratala) only helped develop?

    Darl is getting incredibly desperate, don't you think? Anything to keep from losing the company under his feet, I guess.
    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  2. As *the* former Novell/USG employee... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Informative

    As *the* former Novell/USG employee who rescued the contents of the UNIX International server in 1994 when it went defunct, and saved the electronic copies of the ELF 1.0, DWARF 1.0, Spec1170 (the Single UNIC Specification), TET, ETET, and other documents from extenction before the UI FTP server (hosted in Sumit, NJ) was taken offline (all documents were kindly rehosted for FTP by Ken Germann of Digiboard, Inc., and Utah State University CS Department), I call BS.

    I received verbal permission for making the contents of the archive available from USL's representative to TIS prior to the mirroring. I specificallly called on the phone for this, even though it was a publically acessible FTP site, just to be sure.

    This can be corraborated by Daren Davis, a former Univel then Novell/USG then Caldera employee, and by others who worked at Novell at the time (Jim Freeman knew about the archive, as did Dan Grice, Ron Holt, Bryan Cardoza, and a number of others, some of whom ended up involved with Caldera, and some who didn't).

    The orginal 1.0 ELF specification came primarily out of work by engineers at Intel. The 1.2 specification, which *did* have significant work done by USL, was done under the auspices of TIS, with the *explicit* understanding that the result would be available as an ABI standard for all.

    ftp://ftp.digibd.com/ USA GMT -6 25-Jan-95 belal@sco.com (Bela Lubkin> {posting}
    DigiBoard
    keng@digibd.com
    Server : http://www.digibd.com/
    Files : Digiboard (digifax, digiline: drivers, isdn); pub: HP4laser (lp
                      model for autohandling of PCL/PostScript jobs), SCO-ports,
                      uiarchive (archive of the defunct Unix International effort),
                      unixware, WWW

    Note that this is just an excerpt from a Usenet posting for the site listing for the site - the mirroring occurred in early 1994 (January, if I remember correctly), and the UI servers were defunct as of Mar 1994, when the mailing list archives were moved over. Novell acquired USL from AT&T in Jun 1994.

    An ironic, IMO, thing to note in the posting above is that the location of the archive is being disseminated by an SCO (the real SCO) employee.

    -- Terry