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Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 07:41:43 +0100
To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>,
	Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
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cc: chat@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: a public relations opportunity for BSD
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At 23:32 15/05/2003 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
>If you can buy a copy of the SCO Linux product before it's
>no longer available, do it: the legal theory that made them
>withdraw the offer for sale of the product was that their
>sale of it under the GPL granted royalty free license to
>use their IP contained therein with no royalty, in perpetuity.

   I'm not aware of any legal theory which makes it possible to grant 
someone a license by mistake.  Providing that someone from SCO stands up in 
court and says "as soon as we realized that our proprietary code had been 
inserted into the linux project we were distributing, we stopped 
distributing it", I think any reasonable court would rule that their code 
had not been licensed under the GPL.

Colin Percival