[Luni]-understanding the Linux/SCO court case

[David Terrell]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 10:18:31AM -0500, ed-luni at inkdroid.org wrote:
> Not that I don't enjoy a good laugh, but I found this piece to be right on 
> this morning:
> 
>     http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1115156,00.asp

Dvorak is a complete and utter idiot; like most mainstream press
he's completely ignoring the BSD lawsuit precedent.

A brief explanation:
The lawsuit between Unix Systems Laboratory (USL, formerly a division 
of AT&T) and co-defendants Regents of the University of California
(UCB) and BSDi (Berkeley Software Design, inc) was filed over the 
the BSD 4.4 Lite OS, which was the BSD 4.4 Unix codebase rewritten
to purge any remaining AT&T Unix V7 Code still in Berkeley's tree.
AT&T claimed this was still an illegal derivative of AT&T Unix; 
but had the tables turned on them when UCB and BSDi lawyers pointed
out that huge amounts of (4 clause*) BSD licensed code was included
in System V without being compliant with the license.

Eventually, a whopping three files were dropped from the 4.4BSD-Lite
release, and the new release was termed 4.4BSD-Lite2; court-tested,
UCB-approved.  However, large portions of SystemV copyright are
invalid because they're based on illegal versions of BSD code.

If you actually go back and start reading the detailed history of
what SCO is claiming happened, you'll see it's nutty.  Caldera
themselves donated SMP hardware to Alan Cox years before IBM even
adopted Linux, much less started contributing to it; yet somehow
it's impossible for Linux to have gotten SMP support without the
help of IBM?  Nonsense.

 - Dave

* - Four clause BSD license includes the requirement that if you
    advertise the features included in the licensed code, you must
    credit UCB in the advertising.

-- 
David Terrell           | 
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