[TriLUG] SCO turns litigation on Linux users now...

[Mark Shuford]

On Fri, 16 May 2003 15:29:48 -0400
"David R. Matusiak" <dave at matusiak.org> wrote:

> oh, and heres a question --  why all the fire and brimstone projected 
> at IBM and Linux??  is there no infringement (in the eyes of SCO, mind 
> you) on the parts of the *BSD teams?  i mean, free and *nix-like, 
> right??  they should be getting just as much press, threats, and hate 
> mail from SCO.
> 
> ummmm...  wait ---  i hope they /don't/ do that...
> 

That has supposedly already been played out years ago. Unix Systems Lab sued BSD (I believe this was while Berkley still had it) over latent Sys V code. BSD programmers removed or re-coded all the stuff that USL disputed as UNIX(tm)(sm)(C)(bs) code.

USL then went to Novell then to SCO. Berkley's software labs were dis-banded and BSD fragmented into two (I think) commercial products and some four plus Open Source products.

The ideas in Unix are spread all over the computing world. Is SCO gonna sue Andy Tannenbaum over Minix, next? The scheduler and file-systems and memory management have been discussed so much in CS literature that most reasonable implementations could be said to descend from UNIX code. But it's copyright, a particular implementation, which is at question; not the ideas in it. I think SCO may try to confuse a judge/jury on this point.



-- 
Mark Shuford

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
					--Bob Edwards

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