SCO promises to show allegedly copied code -- ADTmag

SCO promises to show allegedly copied code

By Will Kilburn
June 2, 2003

The SCO Group (Lindon, Utah) will reveal some of the Unix source code which it claims found its way onto Linux, and in a teleconference last Friday also said that its legal actions- so far, anyway- are not about copyrights and patents.

“SCO’s enforcement actions, embodied in the suit against IBM, and our letter to 1500 commercial Linux users, are based on the contract rights that flow from SCO’s 30,000 Unix System 5 licenses, with more than 6,000 entities,” said SCO’s president and CEO Darl McBride. “None of SCO’s enforcement actions to date have been based on copyrights or patents. There has been no assertion by Novell, or anyone else, that SCO does not hold these contract rights.”

As for the Linux issue, McBride said that three different groups have found examples of Unix code in Linux, and would reveal some of that suspect code to interested parties starting in June.

“Through all of this, we have maintained this core Unix ownership,” said McBride. “SCO owns the Unix operating system: It owns all the rights to the Unix and UnixWare businesss, including the source code, the contracts, all the legal claims that come out of this. The heat is intense from a number of folks, and the battle is fierce, but we are going to continue down this path, because in the end, we have the legal rights to do so, and it is our crown jewel. This is what we’re fighting for.”

The proof of infringement on that ownership, McBride said, is on the way.

“The month of June is ‘Show and Tell’ time. Everybody’s been clamoring for the code: ‘Show us two lines of code.’ We’re not going to show two lines of code, we’re going to show hundreds of lines of code. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s in this.”