Home » blogs » Prometheus 6's blog

The GPL causes cancer, or, SCO gets really stupid

by Prometheus 6
December 5, 2003 - 2:41am.
on Tech

Open Letter on Copyrights
From Darl McBride, CEO

December 4, 2003

An Open Letter:

Since last March The SCO Group (?SCO?) has been involved in an increasingly rancorous legal controversy over violations of our UNIX intellectual property contract, and what we assert is the widespread presence of our copyrighted UNIX code in Linux. These controversies will rage for at least another 18 months, until our original case comes to trial. Meanwhile, the facts SCO has raised have become one of the most important and hotly debated technology issues this year, and often our positions on these issues have been misunderstood or misrepresented. Starting with this letter, I'd like to explain our positions on the key issues. In the months ahead we'll post a series of letters on the SCO Web site ( www.sco.com ). Each of these letters will examine one of the many issues SCO has raised. In this letter, we'll provide our view on the key issue of U.S. copyright law versus the GNU GPL (General Public License).

SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws. Constitutional authority to enact patent and copyright laws was granted to Congress by the Founding Fathers under Article I, § 8 of the United States Constitution:

Congress shall have Power ? [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This Constitutional declaration gave rise to our system of copyrights and patents.


And we are to assume that because Congress can do this, no one has the right to voluntarily enter into other arrangements.

Do we all look that stupid?

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.prometheus6.org/trackback/2400
latest article | previous | next

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Submitted by don (not verified) on December 5, 2003 - 4:40pm.

May SCO go down in a flaming pool of shit! And they aren't even the original creators/holders of the patents. Just another example of a mediocre "new economy" company building a business model to try and strke it rich off the creative sweat and ingenuity of others because they don't possess any creativity of their own. May SCO's McBride burn forever in Intellectual Property Hell.According to a CNET news.com article earlier this past summer: According to a copy of the contract obtained by CNET News.com, Novell sold "all rights and ownership of Unix and UnixWare" to the SCO Group's predecessor, the Santa Cruz Operation. However, the asset purchase agreement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically excludes "all copyrights" and "all patents" from the purchase. (snip...) Novell continues to disagree with SCO. "It's pretty clear that patents and copyrights were excluded and not included in the business as it's described (in the contract), so we don't believe SCO would have copyright and patent enforcement rights," Hal Thayer, vice president of communications for Novell, said Wednesday. (snip ...) The 1995 contract appears to give Novell the edge in the copyright debate, said John Ferrell, an intellectual property attorney with Carr and Ferrell, who reviewed the contract."This would support Novell's contention that SCO does not own the copyrights and does not have the right to litigate" a copyright infringement case, Ferrell said. However, he said, the contract does indicate SCO could pursue a case that a Unix licensee breached its contract.But the contract is odd, Ferrell said. "It's very unusual to have the transfer of a software program and not have the rights of copyright transferred as well," he said.

Submitted by phelps (not verified) on December 5, 2003 - 6:42pm.

This is a massive stock fraud scheme for SCO. I hope that anyone stupid enough to invest in them hoping for a payoff gets burned. The GPL is solid jurisprudence, and SCO doesn't stand a chance. Going beyond the GPL, they have this pesky 500 year old English Common Law doctrine of waiver to try to wade through (also known as, "why didn't you say something years ago when we first started doing this?")