A Canadian Response to SCO

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Max Blanco wrote:

> Can I read somewhere about how this issue affects the little guy?
> I have a 1995 distro of redhat.  Does this affect me?
> What about if I have a 2.2 kernel built in 2000?

Ok, I'm not a lawyer but I do have some idea about how the legal system
works.

Right now SCO is telling Linux users to get a licencing fee.  Right now
you are under no legal obligation to do this.

SCO have made a number of claims, none of which have been substantiated in
court.  If any of these claims are ever substantiated in court (something
many of us feel is unlikely) then you may need to take notice.  Until then
SCOs claims are nothing but words.

> If I read this right, as long as you stick to 2.4 kernel code, who cares?

SCO are going after 2.4.

> Can you delete the offending 27 lines of code from the kernel and still
> make it crash proof and kickass...?

The lines mentioned in the the recent SCO seminars for their resellers
have been shown to be absolutely positively available under the BSD
licence.  This means the code is freely redistributable.  The BSD licence
is far freer than the GPL.

It took the OpenSource community about 5 hours to determine the code SCO
put up on the slides at the seminars was available under the BSD licence.
The fact that the SCO lawyers apparently couldn't figure out the code in
question was available under the BSD licence does not bode well for their
abilities in my eyes, unless of course it was the intention of the lawyers
and those preparing the seminars to deliberately mislead those present in
the audience.

So SCO are still yet to provide any proof of their position, despite their
claims that they have now done so.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
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