hapmoorii

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    • Thu Aug 16th 14:35 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      SCO vs. Novell: The Last Word Has Yet To Be Said
      You wrote something so odd that it compelled me to register. I'm not going to take time reading over a bunch of documents I read a couple of years ago to respond to this article in the depth of detail it deserves because I have no time for it. What I will say is based on all of the contracts I read, I felt like SCO's case against IBM was completely without merit, and Novell's case against SCO was borderline.

      With respect to IBM, you have to realize that what SCO was attempting to say was that SCO licensed Unix to IBM, IBM added stuff like JFS (a file system of their own making, not part of anything provided by SCO), IBM then open-sourced JFS and implemented it in Linux, and consequently, SCO's IP is in Linux. The problem with that is that JFS was never part of what SCO gave IBM. Now, could SCO have done a viral license ala GPL? I guess they could have, but they didn't. None of the AT&T agreements nor the SCO extensions signed by IBM granted SCO anything with regard to code produced by IBM.

      Let's take it a step further. If you read the IBM/AT&T agreements/letters, you will see that IBM retains rights to its programmer's brains. Yeah, programming contracts are this stupid. What that meant is that just because a programmer worked on Unix code and remembered it, doesn't mean that AT&T somehow owned everything that programmer did in the future. In fact, I forget the exact wording, but I remember it being as if the guy could reproduce it almost verbatim from memory if he wanted. That's as long as it was from memory and not a copy/paste or transcription operation. So, if (big if) an IBM AIX programmer shifted over to work on Linux, as long as he/she was not actively looking at Unix code, it didn't matter. He could put whatever he wanted into Linux.

      Now, on Novell and SCO. My memory is failing me somewhat, but I remember the SCO agreement as mainly giving SCO the right to operate the licensing business on behalf of Novell. I don't recall reading anything that sold the business to SCO. It was more like hiring an outside firm to handle contracts and invoicing or something like that. I'm sure it also included the Unix license they needed to continue their own brand of Unix.

      Anyway, I may be a bit off because I considered all of this case closed a long time ago. From what I do remember, it just doesn't sound like very in-depth research was done for this article. It seems more like taking McBride's words at face value which has been proven time and again to be a naive path.
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