[TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Josh Good]

On 2021 Apr  2, 04:26, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
> 
> > There's still a cloud over Caldera's release, because the current license 
> > relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure 
> > the courts said they didn't).
> 
> The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect,
> it's too late anyway.

The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded licence
to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own the
copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by a
judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source.

In fact, it seems that SCO/Caldera/TSG just bought from Novell the "Unix
business" without the UNIX copyrights, and in that vein Old-SCO had a
contract with Novell to collect the UNIX royalties and then to pay said
royalties to Novell keeping a cut of them "for the collecting services".

So the key point here is "unclouded license". Look what is happening now to
IBM because their matter with Caldera/TSG still had clouds of doubt about
it.

I have the suspicion that if Caldera/TSG/XinuOS is allowed to exist, they
will use all and any cloud of doubt to drag to court any UNIX user who
happens to have plenty of money and lacks a UNIX license directly gotten
from the old AT&T or the old UNIX Labs. They are undead money-sucking
vampires.

-- 
Josh Good