I read Ian Lance Taylor's writeup about his visit to SCO to discuss the IBM lawsuit.
Ian remains unconvinced about SCO's claims, but raises very many good points. Strange as it may seem, I'm happy that SCO is being litigious about this and taking IBM to court. There are a number of issues that Ian describes as SCO taking a "broad interpretation" of IP issues around copyright; they are correct in stating that the difference of opinion between IBM and SCO on these matters is best left to a court to sort out.
Ian got a chance to examine what SCO claims is pilfered code:
Here is what I think I can say about the code I saw. The code is fairly trivial--the kind of stuff I wrote in school. The similar portions of the code were some 80 lines or so. Looking around the Net, I found close variants of the code, with the same comments and variable names, in sources other than Linux distributions. The code is not in a central part of the Linux kernel. The code does not appear to have been contributed to Linux by SCO or Caldera. The code exists in current versions of the Linux kernel.Assuming Ian's characterization is factually correct, this lawsuit is seeking an interpretation of "derivative work". There's a lot of grey area between IBM and SCO on these matters: did the source originate in System V? Did the code in question draw from publically available research? What constitutes "derivative work" in the context of an OS: anything that ships with the base OS, or something more fundemental? Then there are all of the other issues surrounding the case: is SCO the rightful owner of Unix? Do the commit logs support or refute SCO's assertions?
From my paultry understanding of copyright law, it is not a copyright violation if two authors acting independantly of each other both produce small fragments of nearly identical material within a much larger work. That is, I cannot claim copyright infringement if I write a novel with the phrase «He said abruptly, "turn down that music!"» and you write a novel with the phrase «He said, "turn down that infernal music!"». And no one in their right mind would go to court about something that trivial, yet Ian's description of some of the contested code sounds remarkably similar.
Maybe, just maybe, this case will clarify similar rights of fair use, "simple and obvious expression" and copyright protection in the realm of software.
