Interview in Byte with Chris Sontag/SCO and FUD relating to BSDsettlement agreement

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 17 June 2003 at  6:08:06 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <3EEF00E4.9000908 at freebsd.mheller.org>
>             Martin Heller <tracking at freebsd.mheller.org> writes:
>> Will the FreeBSD project issue an offical statement relating to these
>> allegations?
>> What will happen to FreeBSD if SCO aims at the BSD projects. Could SCO
>> revoke the Settlement Agreement and pursue a court ruling?
>
> This is not an official statement from the project.
>
> There is not now, nor has there *EVER* been *ANY* System V code in
> BSD.  *EVER*.  NEVER.  NEVER.  NEVER.

Agreed.  The fact that Sontag even mentions this detracts further from
an already very stupid interview.  I've put an analysis at
http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/sco-sontag-16jun2003.html.

> The IP connected with the BSD suit of the early 1990s derived from
> pre System V and System III versions of Unix.  In fact, Version 7
> unix has more Berkeley copyrights in it than AT&T copyright notices.

The Seventh Edition?  Nope, as far as I can tell there's no BSD code
there.  In /usr/src:

  $ find .|xargs grep -i "bell telephone"|wc -l
        27
  $  find .|xargs grep -i berkeley
  Binary file ./cmd/learn/lib/C.a matches
  ./cmd/refer/test:new providence murray hill berkeley heights
  $ find .|xargs grep -i california|wc -l
         0

Most of the "Bell Telephone" lines were indeed copyrights.  Or did you
mean something else?

> The settlement terms specifically state that SCO cannot sue anybody
> who makes a release based on 4.4-LITE.  The settlement agreement is
> BINDING on both parties.  SCO cannot revoke it, and will have a hell
> of a legal fight if they try.

That depends on how much money we can put into the legal fight.  But
they don't need to do that: they can simply make the same claim that
they did about Linux, that somebody has since imported UNIX code into
the tree.  The settlement has nothing to do with that.

Greg
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