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SCO in a nutshell

Posted 02/22/2004 @ 9:45 AM
by
Matt Woodward

It's not a new O'Reilly and Associates book, but it *is*, perhaps, the most concise and unbiased synopsis of this whole SCO/IBM/Novell/Linux debacle. Over the past few months, the SCO spin doctors have done a good job of muddying the waters so that the issues are difficult to recognize. David Berlind's Reality Check distills the known facts and makes the points of contention clear once again. Quoted from his article on ZDnet:

Right now, the easiest way to get your head around this very complicated case is to frame it with two primary vectors. Both will probably come down to interpretation. It's about whether SCO owns it, to what it extent it owns it and, if it has some or all of the ownership, just what exactly it is entitled to.

The article goes on to define the two "vectors" and the lynchpin to this whole mess: "the interpretation of Novell's sale of Unix to SCO". David also does his homework and points out that the GPL counter-argument made by Eben Moglen may not hold water because SCO (then Caldera) may have never added their own copyright notice to their redistribution of Linux. (ie. you can't just accidentally give away a copyright.) He even goes so far as to point out that the court documents for the settlement of the "AT&T v. BSD" case over Unix copyright were sealed and the exact agreement is currently unknown. The wording in this settlement may strengthen or weaken SCO's case depending on what was agreed to between BSD and AT&T.

Unfortunately, David Berlind's editorial is a little bit too dense to summarize any more than we already have, so you will have to read it for yourself to get the whole story. Though what he does conclude with is what we have pretty much known for some time now: "In the end, it appears that a judge is going to have to make the call."

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