SCO Claims IBM/SGI Licenses are Revokable 378
shadow099 writes "SCO claims in an open letter writen by Blake Stowell, Director Public Relations SCO, that the Unix licenses to IBM and SGI can be revoked. " This is just the latest volley in the ongoing circus. It keeps getting funnier!
Re:Do not become complacent (Score:3, Informative)
No, it wouldn't. If the GPL is found to be invalid, then normal copyright law applies. Nothing written under it could be distributed, extended, etc. without express permission from the copyright holder. The GPL doesn't protect code; copyright law does that. The GPL grants freedoms where normal copyright law would restrict them.
By the Original (Score:5, Informative)
So, by the original language, the license can only be revoked by specifying the breach. SCO has yet to specify the breach so much as point in its general direction.
The other proviso is that if the breach is fixed (ie the infringing stuff is removed) then the license can no longer be revoked. So, if the offending code in Linux is identified and removed- there is no breach.
Is it just me or are they no even bothering to hide their alterior agenda anymore?
Ammendment X (Score:4, Informative)
Namely because there are other ways of enforcing your contracts. I haven't seen all of the SGI contracts, but here is Ammentment X [byu.edu] to the IBM contract and it clearly states IBM has an "irrevocable" and "perpetual" contract. It also says that SCO is not otherwise limited from enjoining or prohibiting IBM in other ways.
Licenses really can be revoked (Score:3, Informative)
Licenses really can be revoked under the terms of the license itself. The terms a government issues a drivers license under would include the specific laws involved. They cannot just arbitrarily revoke a drivers' license, but they can under those specific laws. If you commit certain actions the law says you may lose your license for, it can be revoked.
Likewise, a private license for use of some property can also be revoked under the agreed terms. Generally, if the agreed terms are violated, the license can be revoked. If SGI and/or IBM did release UNIX intellectual property to the public, that would be such a violation. And we do know SCO is claiming that.
The issue now comes down to whether such a claim is valid. Did SGI take XFS from UNIX and release it publically. That cannot be the case, however, because there is no XFS in UNIX. SGI developed XFS themselves. Arguably, pieces of XFS might have gotten some UNIX code in there, but once pointed out, that can be removed. Did SCO perform due diligence in pointing that out? Not until recently have they started pointing at any specific violations (while still making vague and unsubstantiated claims that lots of other violations exist), and those are weak due to previous releases in other forms.
And how the hell do we know there isn't any violations in SCO's non-Linux closed-source product ... violations of the GPL with code taken from Linux and put in there?
IP attorney Mark Radcliffe noted: (Score:1, Informative)
Irrevocable means you can't terminate, you can only get injunctive relief (stopping breaching the agreement), otherwise irrevocable would have no separate meaning."
Yahoo seems to know what 'irrevocable' means:
http://suewidemark.netfirms.com/geocities
Radcliffe also noted that the rights sought by Yahoo and other community sites are exactly those that publishers are granted under U.S. copyright law: the right to distribute, reproduce, publicly perform and display, and modify or make a derivative product.
So while members think they are only receiving space to place their intellectual property, the Web sites are acting like publishers.
Getting back to Stowell, he seems to forget that their amended complaint is a tort about contract violations by IBM, not patents, trademarks or copyrights.
From a Mozilla interview: "An important question in the SCO IP sagas has been whether SCO-Caldera owns copyrights for JFS (Journaling File System), RCU (Read, Copy, and Update), NUMA (Non-uniform Memory Access) software, and other AIX code that IBM contributed to the Linux kernel. Simply put these are important code packages that help to make GNU/Linux an enterprise and server grade operating system.
It appears from Blake Stowell's answers to the copyright-related questions that SCO says it does not have copyrights to JFS, RCU, and NUMA software code or to items (a) through (k) of paragraph 108 of SCO's Amended Complaint in the SCO-Caldera v IBM lawsuit.
It also appears from Blake Stowell's answers that SCO does not claim copyright to any of the IBM-written AIX code. All SCO claims copyright to in AIX is that AIX code which is Unix code that was included with System V code that IBM licenses from SCO.
That seems to remove most, if not all, SCO's claims that the Linux kernel contains SCO-copyrighted code. "