Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 21:22:49 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FYI: SCO Group Slaps IBM with $1B Suit Message-ID: <3E682CA9.D1ED95A5@mindspring.com> References: <200303070409.XAA26031@leviathan.cnchost.com>
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Bakul Shah wrote: > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,920733,00.asp > > ... > At that time he also confirmed to eWeek that the company > had hired high-profile attorney David Boies and his legal > firm to investigate whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and > versions of BSD infringed on the Unix intellectual > property it owned. > ... I have to really laugh. First, the USL/UCB lawsuit settlement, once and for all, decided the question of whether or not the UNIX source code contains trade secrets: it doesn't. Second, Sun bought out of their royalty agreements, with a license in perpetuity, and, among other things, they published the Solaris Source code: even if it could be argued that trade secrets were added after the version from which the UCB code was licensed, the trade secrets are well and truly disclosed now, by Sun. The fact that they are going after IBM for disclosure seems to indicate that this is an attempt to cast it as a trade secret disclosure issue; otherwise we would be reading about them going after Red Hat. Third, one of the things that USL sold, prior to its sale by AT&T to Novell, was transferrable licenses to universities; one of the ones I went to bought one of these, and we went around and grabbed the serial numbers off of every piece of class A and class B computing equipment that qualified as a recipient of the license. That included every VT100, VT102, VT220, Televideo 910, 915, 925, modem, etc. that we had, so that we would be assured of our ability to have it for 100 times the number of CPUs than we had at the time, as a way of planning for the future. It'd probably be pretty cheap for IBM to buy one of these licenses (they say they have over 30,000 licensees, and these were probably common terms for most of the educational licensees) off a University that's not using the SVR4 source code any more (e.g. using BSD or Linux instead). I know my University, which was relatively small, ended up with some 300 and something transferrable licenses. Assuming 1/3 of their licensees are similar educational licenses, and that our university was average, there's a good 3,000,000 of those things out there and available for purchase at rock bottom prices. 8-). The only real issue they have might be Copyright; however... the thing they claim they are upset about is disclosure of code to the Linux community. But, this is, I think, an error on their part: perhaps they are not understanding that the JFS code that IBM released was derived from OS/2, and not from AIX? I'm not sure what other code they could mean. IBM delayed the DOJ on an antitrust action for what, 10 years? And they delayed a second one for what, 20 years, until the DOJ just gave up? Who here thinks SCO is going to last that long if this is their new revenue model? -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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