Although the particulars
of the claims seem to change daily, and one-by-one the claims have been shot down, SCO??™s basic
assertion in lawsuits against IBM and others is that Linux contains UNIX System V source code
that is owned by SCO. So those who sell or use Linux owe licensing fees to SCO.
As of this writing, many of the charges brought by SCO have been dismissed by the judge in the
case. SCO, however, is currently stating that it may appeal and believes that there is still a foundation
to its charges. A recent wrinkle in SCO??™s case, however, has thrown into doubt how much
right SCO even has to the UNIX source code it purchased from Novell.
To a layman (I am not a lawyer!), the assertions seem weak based on the following facts:
There seems to be no original UNIX code in Linux. And, even if a small amount of code
that could be proved to be owned by SCO had made it in there by mistake, that code
could be easily dropped and rewritten.
Concepts that created UNIX all seem to be in the public domain, with public specifications
of UNIX interfaces blessed by AT&T itself in the form of published POSIX and
System V Interface Definition standards. While the AT&T UNIX code was covered by
copyright, the concepts that went into that code were never patented.
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