Yet another "Did". Did Novell sell the Intellectual Property rights to SCO? Novell claims to still own the IP. In an open letter from Novell CEO Jack Messman to SCO CEO Darl McBride, Novell challenges SCO's claim that it owns the copyrights and patents to UNIX; it says the purchase agreement Novell and SCO entered into in 1995 didn't transfer those rights to SCO. In addition, Novell asked SCO to provide facts that back up its claim that certain UNIX code was copied into Linux. "SCO continues to say that it owns the UNIX System V patents, yet it must know that it does not," Messman writes. "A simple review of U.S. Patent Office records reveals that Novell owns those patents." Further, per Novell CEO Jack Messman, SCO has (lately) been trying (unsuccessfully) to buy the IP form Novell. "Apparently you share this view," he writes to McBride, "since over the last few months you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected." If SCO doesn't own the IP, who cares what they find, unless, they can prove that their people wrote that code as part of their enhancements. Then it might get interesting. Are we having fun yet??? George -------Original Message------- Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 12:30:35 -0700 (GMT) From: Alan Dayley It is not that scary, really. Why? Let's assume that some code really is the same in Linux and Unix. As far as I can gather from the article all SCO did was say "Look! They are the same!" That doesn't answer these questions: -Did the code come from a third party code base? -Did the code get put into Unix from Linux? -Did the code get put into Unix AND Linux by SCO/Caldera? -Did the code originate in BSD code that was already declared free of Unix license restrictions a decade or so ago? There are many reasons why the code could be the same and still not help SCO's claims. The "devil is in the details" as always. SCO is not providing any details because they either don't know them or they would not help their current hype cause. It will get ugly, but we already knew it would. Alan -------Original Message------- From: Thomas Cameron Sent: 06/06/03 08:59 AM To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Subject: Re: First Analyst Impressed By SCO's 'Proof' > > To be honest, this is really scary news. I *hope* that IBM settles this by buying SCO, but I suspect that will not happen. I think this could get real ugly, real soon. Thomas