beingchinmay
Member
The Linux lawsuits that got the most press in the past few years are the ones involving Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). SCO is the current owner of the UNIX source code that passed from AT&T Bell Labs to UNIX System Laboratories to Univel (a lot of people don’t know that one), to Novell, and eventually to the company formed by joining SCO and Caldera Systems. 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. 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.
- AT&T dropped a similar lawsuit in 1994 against BSD, which had actually started with UNIX source code, but had rewritten it completely over the years.
- Exactly what SCO owns has been brought into question because Novell still claims some rights to the UNIX code it sold to SCO. (In fact, SCO doesn’t even own the UNIX trademark, which Novell gave away to the Open Group before it sold the source code to SCO. Attempts were underway in 2004 by SCO to trademark the name UNIX System Laboratories.)
