First Analyst Impressed By SCO's 'Proof'

[George Gambill]

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 <alandd@mindspring.com>

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 <thomas.cameron@camerontech.com>
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