IANAL.

There is no copyright infringement - the code was rewritten.
There is no patent infringement - the patents expired.
There is no trademark infringment.

IBM and SCO had a contract.  IBM may be in violation
of that contract.  IBM may be subject to legal action
involving that contract.

How can this affect the kernel?  The kernel is released
under the GPL, which posits that the recipient has no
legal obligation beyond copyright, and has additional
rights under certain conditions.  Could that license
be revocable as a result of third party legal action?
My understanding of copyright is that it is only a
right of first sale.  The conditions of that sale
cannot be revised without the purchaser's consent.

At most I would think that IBM could bear additional
penalties (perhaps accounted for in the billion dollar
figure) for having "leaked" the intellectual property
under a GPL license.  Similarly, if I discover some
trade secret held by a company I am not contracted to,
and that secret is not trademarked or patented, I am
free to tell the world the facts of that secret (only
a particular expression of facts can be copyrighted).

This could have some negative impact on future
contributions to the kernel from corporations who have
chosen to prostrate themselves to such contracts, but
I don't understand how it could affect IP which has
already been transferred.


On 12 Mar 2003, David Mandala wrote:

> On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 23:00, Aaron Cordova wrote:
> > Has there been any news about what SCO is planning to do? And if so have
> > there been any projects started to replace their software?
> >
> [snip]
>
> Interesting read http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html
> --
> David IS Mandala
> gpg fingerprint 8932 E7EF CCF5 1B8C 1B5C A92E C678 795E 45B2 D952
> Phoenix, AZ (480) 460-7545 HP, (602) 741-1363 CP
> http://www.them.com/~davidm/
>
>
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