[TUHS] Microsoft, SCO, and a certain License

[Jim Capp]

On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 10:40:14AM -0500, Larry J. Blunk wrote:
> 
>  Microsoft and SCO have been very coy about what it is that Microsoft
> actually licensed.  I believe the closest they have come to explaining
> it can be found in a Byte interview by Trevor Marshall --
> http://www.byte.com/documents/s=8276/byt1055784622054/0616_marshall.html
> where Chris Sontag of SCO is quoted as saying that Microsoft merely
> licensed an "applications interface layer."
> 
>   I take this to mean they are probably talking about header files
> like errno.h, signal.h, etc.   I believe that Microsoft development
> products have iterations of these and they only have Microsoft copyright
> notices in them (no AT&T or BSD notices).   SFU would have them
> as well, although I'm not sure what copyright notices are on those.
> SCO claims that the lack of a copyright notices violates the USL vs.
> BSDi settlement.  Of course, this claim is extremely tenuous (since
> Microsoft's headers files origination likely predates the settlement
> and were derived independently from public sources).
> 
>   In the end, I strongly suspect this was a way for Microsoft to funnel
> money to SCO to attack Linux as opposed to Microsoft claims of
> "respecting Intellectual Property Rights."
>  

I think it's very odd that Microsoft would need a license from SCO
at all.  Isn't it true that before there was SCO, there was Microsoft
XENIX?  I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would have divested itself
of all rights in XENIX (including the headers above) when spinning off
SCO.