Linux-streams] LiS in the SCO vs. IBM case?
Francois-Xavier 'FiX' KOWALSKI
Thu, 03 Jun 2004 10:32:02 -0700
Hello Dave & all,
anyone having a comment about the below? This is a quote from an article
published on the excellent <http://lwn.net> so I assume that they are good
sources, although I have not yet come to verify them.
Finally, and, perhaps, most interestingly, SCO has included a set
of other files (exhibit 28-G) for which it claims ownership. The first
part of this list consists of the Linux streams (LiS) patch which
has never been part of the mainline kernel. Interestingly, the LiS
distribution was hosted at Caldera for some time. But the company
formerly known as Caldera would rather forget that now; the company
claims, in its filing, the LiS has not appeared in "any Linux-
related product distributed by SCO."
br.
--
Francois-Xavier "FiX" KOWALSKI /_ __ Tel:+33 (0)4 76 14 63 27
OpenCall Business Unit -- OCBU / //_/ Fax:+33 (0)4 76 14 14 88
Signalling Products Engineering / http://www.hp.com/go/opencall
i n v e n t
Re: [Linux-streams] LiS in the SCO vs. IBM case?
John A. Boyd Jr.
Thu, 03 Jun 2004 10:52:57 -0700
It doesn't matter where intellectual property is hosted. IP ownership
begins with authorship, and transfers only explicitly. Use of IP
doesn't imply ownership at all, and hosting is only a form of use.
That said, very little can stop IP-related lawsuits from being filed,
and little seems to be taken as obvious in such cases. One can only
hope for reasonable and well-informed courts.
As for the authorship question, I can only speak for my contributions;
I don't know about the rest of LiS. At least some of my contributions
to LiS, which include fifos & pipes, FD passing, and fattach/fdetach,
weren't part of any SCO or Caldera Unix variant when I wrote them (from
scratch, using only manpages and books as references), so they couldn't
possibly have been authored by any party with an SCO ownership interest.
I don't know if they're yet in AIX or other SCO-derived Unix variants,
but I have no access to such systems to be able to check that for
myself.
Maybe SCO has looked a little closer at LiS and realized that it's more
original than not.
-John
Re: [Linux-streams] LiS in the SCO vs. IBM case?
Brian F. G. Bidulock
Thu, 03 Jun 2004 11:41:55 -0700
John,
It appears that many of SCO's claims are that their rights are infringed
by any implementation of an SVR 3 or later interface. Indeed their claims
against AutoZone appear to be that just because Linux implements the same
SVR 4 IPC interface that the mechanisms somehow must be derived from SCO's
copyrights. IANAL, but that doesn't sound valid in of itself.
I will soon post a beta of Linux Fast-STREAMS. It might have the advantage
that, as it stands, it is a single-authored clean room expression with no
contributions from outside sources.
--brian
Re: [Linux-streams] LiS in the SCO vs. IBM case?
John A. Boyd Jr.
Thu, 03 Jun 2004 12:02:54 -0700
Goes to my point about what prevents IP lawsuits from being filed... 8^(
Sounds like confusion about what copyright is (as opposed specifically
to what patent is), but I now expect that sort of confusion.
(I don't know what 'IANAL' is...)
If someone is confusing patent and copyright protections, your
clean-room efforts may not help much. Patent violations are
patent violations clean room or not, and if someone decides to
sue you for reading a manual or man page and working from it, all
you can do is defend yourself against the charge, and try to get
your lawyer to convince the judge to tell the plaintiff that
they don't know what they're talking about and that what you've
done has copyright protection if no patents have been infringed.
But this is hypothetical; I don't think it's likely.
-John
Re: [Linux-streams] LiS in the SCO vs. IBM case?
Brian F. G. Bidulock
Thu, 03 Jun 2004 12:17:53 -0700
John,
On Thu, 03 Jun 2004, John A. Boyd Jr. wrote:
> Goes to my point about what prevents IP lawsuits from being filed... 8^(
>
> Sounds like confusion about what copyright is (as opposed specifically
> to what patent is), but I now expect that sort of confusion.
>
> (I don't know what 'IANAL' is...)
I Am Not A Lawyer. (A little way of avoiding establishing what would
otherwise be a feduciary relationship.) Maybe I should say IAAE. (I Am An
Engineer. Couldn't spell it before, but I are one. ;)
>
> If someone is confusing patent and copyright protections, your
> clean-room efforts may not help much. Patent violations are
> patent violations clean room or not, and if someone decides to
> sue you for reading a manual or man page and working from it, all
> you can do is defend yourself against the charge, and try to get
> your lawyer to convince the judge to tell the plaintiff that
> they don't know what they're talking about and that what you've
> done has copyright protection if no patents have been infringed.
>
> But this is hypothetical; I don't think it's likely.
I think its unlikely too. Perhaps SCO just threw it on the pile of
unreasonably universal claims.
Nevertheless, a single-authored work might make more traceable the defense
against more honest claims that the work was copied directly and substantially
from copywritten sources.
--brian
Re: [Linux-streams] LiS in the SCO vs. IBM case?
Dave Grothe
Thu, 03 Jun 2004 12:20:58 -0700
Caldera never hosted LiS in the sense of taking on any maintenance
responsibility for it. They included it on their distribution CDROM for
awhile. It was once hosted on a machine in Spain (I think) prior to my
taking it over. Once I took over it has always been hosted at Gcom.
As far as I know LiS is original work from man pages, the SVR4 STREAMS
Programmers Guide and The Magic Garden. Most of it was written before I
started working on it. The lion's share of my initial work on LiS was
testing, debugging and portability. All the SMP work was mine and bears no
resemblance to the brain-dead approach to SMP that UnixWare SVR4 STREAMS
uses. Others have made contributions that seem fairly obviously to be
original work -- fifos, fattach, ldl driver, inet driver, etc.
I don't feel like registering for lwn.net, so I will look at the rest of the
article after June 10 when they make it generally available.
-- Dave