SCO Suit / MS Patent License

Bayard Coolidge bayard at tds.net
Wed May 21 22:05:05 EDT 2003


Welcome Home, Jeff!

It's great to have you back!!

AFAICT, the issue is NOT (necessarily) Patent infringement, but the use
of copyrighted code that was in the original AT&T/Bell Labs UNIX code
that eventually descended into SCO's hands. It appears to me that MS has
bought themselves a license similar to what HP obtained when they got
DEC's intellectual property from Compaq. (And, yes, I saw DEC's license
many, many years ago).

It's going to be a real mess, that's for sure. IMNSHO, not much has been
said on the effect of the BSD code on the case, and I think that it may end
up playing an important role. I certainly don't know the code in any kind of
depth to point to specific routines, etc., but as a general concept, 
it's easy
to see that SCO could scream that IBM lifted some code from SCO's
foo.c and foo.h, and someone could refute that the same routine was coded
in a very similar manner in *BSD, and it would be straightforward for
someone to write code to implement that functionality in a very similar way
as well.

Sadly, a lot of the software patents out there, generally speaking, seem to
have been granted by USPTO examiners who had no clue about prior art.
I haven't looked at the 3 you cited, but for crying out loud, DEC had 
all kinds
of error reporting mechanisms in RSX-11M and RSTS/E which ended up
in VMS, and uerf (ULTRIX error report formatter) was derived from that,
in part, all back 10-20 years ago... *sigh*

Just my 20 millidollars' worth,

Bayard




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