[Sussex] SCO/Caldera are obviously desperate

[Geoff Teale]

Morning chaps,

A little while ago some rumblings about SCO/Caldera (who own UNIX(TM)) came
out about them possibly trying to recover funds from other implimentation
for breach of their copyright.  Well, it's happening. SCO/Caldera are suing
IBM, claiming that as a licensee of UNIX they are sharing trade secrets with
the Free Software Community.

An article can be found here: 
http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Technology%20News&T=markets_box.
ht&middle=ad_frame2_all&s=APmfr7BXWQ2FsZGVy

..appologies if that link wraps...

The article incorrectly claims that LINUX is not copyrighted - a little
research would have told them that the GPL is indeed a license based on
copyright (we may call it copyleft, but the mechanism is _still_ copyright,
without copyright there can be no license).  Now, those of us who are old
enough to remember (or old enough to read at least ;-P ) will now that this
whole thing happened once before - the Berkleyites had to remove who swaves
of UNIX code from BSD.  The difference here is that the core of Linux was
written from scratch (it had to be in order to be in line with the GPL -
which prohibited, for example, the use of the BSD TCP/IP stack), it
certainly doesn't use any of the UNIX source in the way that BSD did.  So
what SCO/Caldera is claiming is an abuse of something less tangible than the
actual source code - a trade secret.  Now trade secrets are dangerous ground
in US law - anything  that gies competitve avantage in a market-place can be
defined as a trade secret.  This is all well and good, but to proove the
case they will have to prove that a section of code in LINUX :

00000000 Whilst not the same as UNIX code impliments identical
functionality.
10000000 Does something that only UNIX does.
01000000 Is something that gives UNIX competitive advantage.
11000000 Is not openly published or generally understood outside of licensed
agreement. 
00100000 Was not thought of independently.
10100000 Was explicity given to the developers by IBM employees who had
gained understanding of said technology as a benefit of licensing UNIX from
SCO.

Can anyone think of an example?  Well, actually most of the kernel code
could be said to impliment very similar functionality to UNIX - but proving
that this is as a result of IBM giving away trade secrets is going to be
tough - rumour has it that if the case against IBM is succesful (SCO/Caldera
want  US$1,000,000,000 (that's a US Billion, not an EU one..)) that HP, Sun
and SGI will also get the call.  

Obviously I don't know the facts of the case, but this seems like an act of
desperation.  It's true that emergence of Linux and FreeBSD probably hurt
SCO more than any other UNIX vendor (indeed they are just about dead now),
but I have to wonder exactly what trade-secrets they are talking about?
Ho-Hum, maybe if Caldera had stuck to Free Software principles and worked on
producing a decent distribution instead of just inventing new ways to charge
people more for free stuff ( sounds a lot like SCO Unix to me :-)  ) then
maybe they wouldn't have to chase IBM for a billion dollars just to survive.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"I sing sometimes for the war that I fight
'cause every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"
 - Ani DiFranco "My IQ"


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