NewsForge: McKusick on SCO’s Latest Copyright Claims
NewsForge asked longtime Unix and BSD guru Kirk McKusick, who
has intimate knowledge of the original AT&T versus BSD legal
battles over Unix source code in the early 1990s, to comment on
SCO’s recent claims of copyright infringement in Linux. McKusick
says he believes Torvalds when he says he did not copy the files in
question, but notes that may be not the real issue here. McKusick
also questions whether the GPL license could be applied to the code
even if the requisite copyright notices had appeared.“SCO’s letter of warning to certain Linux users claims that
‘Certain copyrighted application binary interfaces (‘ABI Code’)
have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted UNIX code base and
contributed to Linux for distribution under the General Public
License (‘GPL’) without proper authorization and without copyright
attribution…'”
Groklaw: Linus Corrects McKusick
“McKusick said, in part:
“‘Linus Torvolds [sic] says that he typed in these files from
scratch and I believe that he did. Unfortunately that does not get
him out of the ABI argument, because, by necessity, he had to use
the same names and values.’“But Linus didn’t use the same names and values. He used the
Minix names and values.“How do I know? I asked Linus…”