SCO's Tangled Web of Deception

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This just in from Linux Weekly News:

At SCO's annual reseller show, the company's executives put up a couple of 
slides as a way of demonstrating how Unix code had been "stolen" and put into 
Linux. The two slides were photographed and have since appeared on Heise 
Online; see them here and here. The escape of these slides has allowed the 
Linux community to do something it has been craving since the beginning of 
the SCO case: track down the real origins of the code that SCO claims as its 
own. The results, in this case, came quick and clear. They do not bode well 
for SCO. 

   http://lwn.net/Articles/45019/

The interesting thing here is that it would appear that Caldera released the 
UNIX v7 code under a BSD license in 2002, thus making the solution to this 
problem very easy. The whole change required would involve adding this 
comment to the code:

  1.) (C) 2001-2002 Caldera Systems, Inc.
  2.) The BSD Restrictions Clause
  3.) The BSD disclaimer clause.

That's it. Add those comments to the top of the file that SGI improperly seems 
to claim as their own, and presto chango, GNU/Linux will no longer violate 
SCO IP (at least this example of it). Assuming the rest of SCO's claims are 
this weak, GNU/Linux could be fixed in a matter of hours once the offending 
code is made known.

SGI could be in for some trouble, however.

  -Tim

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy R. Butler       Universal Networks      www.uninet.info
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