SCO Group

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 20 September 2003 at 17:16:59 -0400, Timothy Luoma wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 14:07:53 -0700, Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 10:15:01AM -0400, Ryck wrote:
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I've heard that SCO Group has an issue with Linux and is planning to sue
>>> everyone who uses Linux because of the claim that it is using their
>>> code.
>>> Does Free BSD have anything to worry about regarding SCO Group and would
>>> Free BSD users be harmless from SCO Group's litigation threats?
>>
>> Not likely.  See the mailing list archives for further discussion.
>
> I tried to find some information and had no luck.  I was also looking for
> any conversation as to whether this situation with SCO was related at all
> to the problems BSD had with... was it AT&T? .... some years back.

The short answer: SCO's predecessors sued the BSDs for much the same
issue over ten years ago.  The matter was settled out of court.  If
you believe this view, then the BSDs have nothing more to fear.

On the other hand, the way SCO is handling the current issue suggests
that they have lost their minds.  They have presented no proof for
their claims (well, they produced some BSD code purported to be in
Linux, and claimed that it was System V code; see
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html#BPF for more
details).  As a result, there's no reason to believe that they
wouldn't make similar claims about the BSDs.  After all, the code in
that example *is* in FreeBSD.

Greg
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