This is a take from one of the older hacks in the FreeBSD development
world. SCO would be fighting an uphill battle on this even if they were
much more powerful and cash rich. People seem to forget the early 90's
USL/UCB settlement (SCO aquired the remains and intelectual property of
USL from Novell, who'd bought it from AT&T), which released a lot
of bits and pieces of code from being considered USL intelectual property.
I'm interested in hearing more about the potential class action angle
Robin mentioned, especially if damages for current and future lost
business for linux vendors could be calculated, it could be devestating to
SCO.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
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
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
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