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.
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 founda-
tion 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 specifica-
tions 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 called 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 trade-
mark, 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.)
Responses to SCO's lawsuits (which certainly hold more weight than any explanations I could
offer) are available from Open Group (
www·opengroup·org
), The Linux Foundation (formerly
OSDL) (
www·linux-foundation·org
), IBM (
ibm·com/linux
), and Red Hat (
www·redhat·com
).
The Groklaw site (
www·groklaw·net
) is another good spot to learn about SCO lawsuits against
Linux. If you are interested in the paper trail relating SCO's ownership of UNIX, I recommend the
Novell's Unique Legal Rights page (
www·novell·com/licensing/indemnity/legal.html
).
Software Patents
Most agree that it is illegal for someone to copy a software company's code and redistribute it with-
out permission. However, the concept of being able to patent an idea that a company might incor-
porate in its code has become a major point of contention in recent years. Can someone patent the
idea of clicking an icon to open a window?
Software companies are scrambling to file thousands of patents related to how software is used.
While those companies may never create products based on those patents, the restrictions those
patents might place on other software companies or open source software development is a
major issue.
26
Linux First Steps
Part I
