Wain wrote:
Interesting, but wouldn't Novell's original claim still hold true?? I thought SCO was claiming patent theft, not copyright infingment.
SCO is claiming theft of trade secrets, among other things. The full complaint should be available somewhere at
http://www.sco.com/scosource when they get their servers back online again. Patent ownership probably can't hurt in terms of proving who invented/owns the 'secrets.'
Novell didn't 'cave' blindly; they had an old contract waved back in their faces, and decided it was too much of a mess to bother with a lawsuit over. They can wait for the IBM suit to blow through, and only have to waste time on it if SCO actually manages to win.
http://www.hostingtech.com/news/2003[...] (Truncated the link text to keep it from stretching the page wide.)
http://theregister.co.uk/content/archive/31086.htmlOf course, from
http://news.osdir.com/article203.html, this shows who SCO thought really owned what recently... and why Novell really doesn't have to give two craps either way:
Further, from Bruce Perens via LWN.net: "it interesting to note the following in SCO's annual report as filed with the SEC: "The Company has an arrangement with Novell, Inc. ("Novell") in which it acts as an administrative agent in the collection of royalties for customers who deploy SVRx technology. Under the agency agreement, the Company collects all customer payments and remits 95 percent of the collected funds to Novell and retains 5 percent as an administrative fee." SCO never owned Unix; it just does the paperwork for a 5% cut. (Thanks to Karsten Self, who posted this to the linux-elitists list)"
So if Linux customers do get shaken down... Novell still gets a 95% cut? ...Meanwhile, *their* Linux business is well-protected by ownership of the patents, should SCO's crackheads-at-the-helm try to turn around and crash on them.
One of the more interesting ways to follow this is through
Greg Lehey's analysis:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html. As a veteran
BSD developer, he's quite familiar with the old USL/BSD suit and its outcome... and also versed in much arcane UNIX lore.
One of the interesting lessons of that suit was that the Berkely side actually came away with
more "UNIX" than anyone may have expected, since USL was proved to have resold *their* code while removing the copyright. (Resale would've been allowed, but copyright violation is copyright violation, even when you give it out for free!) You can see him approaching from this angle as he picks at Raymond's analysis; from his perspective, if the code was modified to the point that more was 'new' than 'the originator's property,' Linux would still have good grounds for ownership, so there's no harm in considering the possibility, and hey, it's not his project anyway. ;-)
Of course, the BSD code was never challenged over 'trade secrets' that I know of, USL was happy to discuss what they found infringing, and the settlement officially *blessed* the 4.4 Lite (2?) sources for all eternity.
In contrast, SCO's refused to provide evidence to the community so the problem can be resolved; this shows they're more interested in the 'extortion' angle than simple defense of their property. In essence, they've reported their car as stolen, claim a dealer has it on his lot, and are trying to sue for damages while refusing to reveal the make, model, or VIN, or even file a police report. (A 'police report' being a direct claim of copyright infringement against, say, whoever [at SGI?] professed to have copyright on it by submitting it to Linux, rather than the company with the deepest pockets.) You can argue - and occasionally they've argued - that they're only going after IBM because IBM put developers on Linux who might have maybe come in contact with what might sort of possibly be code that could've at one point been considered SCO (or USL?) property in AIX... but you can't make that jibe with their call upon *users* to stock up on magic Keep_SCO_From_Suing_You beans.
