Tom Diehl on 2 Jan 2004 17:49:02 -0000


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[PLUG] Re: SCO Letter received


On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, W. Chris Shank wrote:

> I know someone (at a very large company) who is using RedHat with
> Oracle. They just received their SCO letter which also lists the
> supposed files in violation (among them errno.h, a.out.h, ioctl[s].h,
> signal.h). I've looked at a few files, they seem trivial to me. I can't
> see how SCO could claim copyrights to them, especially ones like errno.h
> or ioctl.h that are just simple header definition files. Unless they are
> making a claim to the effect that they own the mapping of error code 40
> to definition ERNBLAHBLAHBLAH. It seems to me that would come from the
> Unix spec anyway and be open for anyone to use?
> 
> Either way, he got the letter. Anyone else get this? What do you suggest
> someone who receives this letter do?
> 
> My non-lawyer advice was: 1) talk to a lawyer, not me 2) do nothing, see
> what pans out between IBM and SCO and Red Hat and SCO 3) keep the letter
> for possible use in a class action or criminal suit.

The talk to their lawyer is the best advice for starters. Having said that
there was a rather lengthy thread on lkml a week or 2 ago where Linus and
friends dissected their claims. People from around the world were digging
up all of the old archives they could find and the bottom line seemed to 
be that their claims were not worth the paper they were written on.

Look in the archives for details. I forget the exact subject but IIRC
SCO was in it. :-))

.........Tom
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