SCO Group wins Unix copyright appeal
Summary
Topics
A skeptical federal judge earlier had ruled that Novell had retained Unix copyrights when it sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation, a company whose Unix assets SCO Group later acquired. But the appeals court overturned that decision, based in part on a close reading of the Unix asset purchase agreement, sending the matter to trial for a decision. The appeals court did uphold a ruling that SCO owed Novell royalty payments, though, according to a 55-page filing.
SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride, who's been demonized by the Linux faithful, was happy with the decision. "Today is not the end of the war but it certainly is a key battle that we've won," he said in a statement in the Salt Lake Tribune. "Now it's time to move on to the next series of battles with our victory in hand."
This article was originally posted on CNET News.
Just In
The flushing toilet was invented in 1596, not by Thomas Crapper as most people think, but by Sir John Harington. Harington, a British nobleman and godson of Queen Elizabeth I, invented a valve that when pulled would release water from a water closet. Sir John recommended flushing the toilet once or twice a day, although with our modern technology, we know that is probably not sufficient. (Rumor has it that, in Robin Hood's day, King Arthur - angry with how his brother ruled the country while the King was gone, named fair toilette, 'the john' - AKA as 'the Jon' to you folks.)
Go here for more details.
http://www.didyouknow.org/toilets.htm
Like the way you are doing now by suggesting your opinion is fact? I'm not a Loverock fan, but you sir, are not helping.
Now... on to more technical things...
Remember what Pamela was writing all along as the trial progressed - that the judge was treading carefully to keep the books clean for appeal.
Yep, this'll drag things out for those that care to watch. But business has long since moved on - Nothing to see here.
They're like a dictator that nukes the whole world if it doesn't have its every demand met.
I can't wait until Microsoft die.
Are you really that much of an idiot, or do you just play one on the internet?
What I want to know, if you hate Microsoft so much, and blame them for all that is wrong in the world, then WHAT has Microsoft done to you, PERSONALLY (not to someone else, not to another company, not to the little furry creatures running around outsode) that has hurt you so much. What has Microsoft done to you that has taken money, food, joy, or anything else from you that hurt you so bad?
Do I approve of their business practices? That's not what I'm questioning, but there are so many people out there who say that Microsoft is so bad, they deserve to be wiped off the map. So, what is it that they have done to each individual personally that each person hates them so?
I've asked others that question before and they always start listing monopolies, buying technologies or other companies... well, take a look at Google people! To me, Google has become the NEW Microsoft...
I'll sit back and wait for the flames to fire my way
So, SCO is in bankruptcy. IF they ultimately win ownership, what happens to the copyrights? Sold to the highest bidder to pay off debts? Transferred to the largest SCO debtor? Retained by SCO as a financial asset for continued operation?
This will drag on for more years. In the meantime, Linux just keeps cranking away. I don't know of any corporate customers who even consider the copyright aspects of UNIX when making a decision to deploy Linux in their enterprise. Nor any of the hosting companies or cloud providers. Even less so for small business owners and private users.
So in the end, it really doesn't matter to us.
All this says is that the original decision was hasty, SCO would have to win something IN COURT.
It is simply a stay of execution, done so that the vultures who propped up SCO with their bucks can force SCO into Chapter 7 so they can pick out the juicy tidbits of the SCO carcass and at least recoup a bit of that money.
Business as usual in the Linux shops. And I see that, as usual, you don't know what yer talking about.
It is simply a stay of execution, done so that the vultures who propped up SCO with their bucks can force SCO into Chapter 7 so they can pick out the juicy tidbits of the SCO carcass and at least recoup a bit of that money.
WHAT juicy tidbits?
Dude, are you high? What the heck are you talking about?
All this says is that SCO owes money to Novell, and that SCO should have had a trial before they lost, rather than a summary judgement.
Bottom line: SCO will waste more of its investors money beating this dead horse. For Novell, it means a few more pennies, and for the rest of the Linux world, it's a footnote in the history books.
You might want to read this website for a decent education: http://againstmonopoly.org/.
Enjoy.
Reference:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090825175606636
In the meantime, this provides another opportunity for Darl McBride to open his mouth and insert both his feet.
I am going to buy a distro or two to make sure that I continue to have an alternative to Windows!
Of course I'll do so clandestinely so that the software cops won't come looking for my copies!
Mike Sr.
However, I wouldn't worry. Even if the court ordered that Linux couldn't be distributed you could still download it and the open source community would still update it. If they don't care now that Linux ripped code off from Unix, they won't care if the court rules in favor of Sco.
SCO is claiming rights over the original AT&T codebase, of which none exists in Linux and for which SCO can't even claim to own the copyrights for! The point of the appeal is that SCO now gets the chance to fail to convince a jury that it bought these copyrights from Novell, in precisely the same way that it failed to convince the first Judge.
This case has been covered extensively on Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net
Oh yes, the appeal also confirmed that SCO owes Novell millions of dollars in unpaid royalties (SCO being nothing more than Novell's SVR4 licensing agent). And a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy trustee has now been appointed, meaning that SCO's management is no longer running the company.
Frankly, this company pretty much sued themselves into irrelevancy. And that code is now long since changed not to infringe, I'm sure, so they're not likely to have much for future cases.
Congratulations, you "won"- but was it worth bankrupting your company over? Was it worth losing customers over? Was it really worth that much?
Sco sued because quite frankly they were wronged, and their operating system became a joke overnight (of course it was one of the poorer Unix versions to begin with). Sco was in trouble before this and was losing customers to Linux and Solaris. Suing was an attempt to get money for the use of their code, pure and simple.
Its sad that no one even considers the fact that Linux was in the wrong here. Everyone backs Linux and hopes that they get away with it, and worse thinks they should. These same people would be condemning Microsoft (who quite frankly would have just settled by now) if they were being sued for the same thing.
In the end, Sco won't get a dime here and its basically on principle at this point. I have no more worries about this causing an issue with my Linux installations than I do about not being able to use Microsoft Office.
In fact, the proof that Linux is NOT ripped off from Unix source code is the critique by the AT&T guys (Kernighan, Richie, Thompson) about the egregiously POOR programming in the early Linux source code (such as the is*() macros in /usr/include/string.h which Linus implemented as slow, error-prone algorithms, compared the fast, error-resistant look-up methods used in Unix).
In other words, your argument is so stupid that even the AUTHORS of Unix laugh at such a theory.
A little later, I believe it was SCO 3.2v5.0.6, OpenServer "acquired" this exact same bug. It was an exact duplicate of the Anacron bug. SCO patched this bug a little after the Anacron bug fix went out. Nowhere in SCO's documentation was their version of crond shown to be made from Anacron. In fact, there were SCO copyright notices on EMPTY crontab files!
Who stole who's code?
In the early 2000s, SCO began to heavily (and now openly) use FOSS, including GNU's gcc, Apache, OpenSSH, etc. This was while they were simultaneously saying GNU and OpenSource in general were anti-American.
I'm pretty certain the headline is misleading to most people.
Darl is so moron that he doomed SCO by chasing after Linux...
I expect better from ZDNet/CNET
Besides, even if SCO should win ownership of Unix at trial (and that is very unlikely, given the evidence), it's still no use unless it can also prove in the IBM trial that Linux is infringing it, something it has so far completely failed to do.
I am surprised this article is so poor. Stephen Shankland has been following the SCO trials for years, and he has always been quite good.
If you want to read the actual judgement, the place to go, as usual, is groklaw.
Join the conversation!
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox




