Monthly Archives: November 2004

SCO claim to control files crumbles in light of BSD agreement

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OK – so way back when SCO sent a letter to Lehman Brothers claiming ownership of a set of files in the Linux kernel and that they were never intended to be redistributed but were to be strictly controlled.

Asides from the fact that it’s likely that AT&T USL forfeited copyright on anything in V32 UNIX by distributing without any copyright notices it looks like there is even less that SCO can claim any sort of control over.

Now that the BSD settlement is public there are some interesting discrepancies to note between what SCO claim and what the settlement (which bound any successors in interest) says. This defined 3 categories of files, those that were “restricted” from further distribution (Exhibit A files), those that were USL UNIX derived but “may be freely reproduced and redistributed by others without payment of any royalties or fees and without execution of any license agreement with USL and/or the University” as long as they included the USL copyrights (Exhibit B files) and files derived from the BSD Net2 release and included in USL’s UNIX (Exhibit C files).

SCO claims to own an allegedly “copyrighted” ABI contained in errno.h, signal.h, stat.h, ctype.h, ioctl.h, ipc.h, acct.h, a.out.h, ecoff.h and bsderrno.h (yes, really, the BSD errno.h, not USL’s!).

So lets go through them..
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The 1994 BSD Unix Settlement published

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A Groklaw contributor has managed to legally obtain the sealed 1994 settlement between USL (Unix Systems Laboratory) and The Regents of the University of California under the Californian Public Records Law.

It’s a long document, and interesting to note that neither side concedes the others claims, but very interesting in the context that during the case USL conceded that they had distributed the V32 UNIX source files with no copyright notice and the judge pointed out that if he had to rule on it then they were very likely to have lost any copyrights for any material in V32!

FT reports main Microsoft critic US$9.75m better off after antitrust settlement with MS

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Found via Groklaw reporting on a Financial Times story that Micro$oft paid CCIA US$19.75m as part of an anti-trust settlement, and US$9.75m of that ended up in the pocket of their top official and was approved by the CCIA board.

I guess this explains his statement at the time saying “and for important and pragmatic reasons we are choosing to move on with regard to this matter”, I guess almost US$20 million to your organisation counts as a reason to some people. Never mind the principles, smell the money!

This also probably explains Nokia quiting the CCIA in disgust over the settlement. I wonder why Redhat and OSDL are still members ?

Google Scholar – Standing on the shoulder of giants

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Google seems to have outdone itself, they’re about to launch a new service allowing you to “search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports”.

Basically it’s cool. Very cool.

They not only pull up publications, etc, but also then give you a list of their citations as sub-searches. For instance, if you search for mentions of the book “Nobody Nowhere” by Donna Williams you’ll not only get articles that mention it you’ll also find (for those publications that Google groks the format) a list of articles that have cited it.

Of course, you can also have great fun pulling up searches for friends and places you work, or where you used to work.

You can even find really obscure things, like citations for AberMUD (including one from the Australian Defence Force Academy) or some crusty old physicist.. 🙂