[ Thanks to Daniel
James for this link. ]
“The lawsuit between the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and IBM has
been roiling the free software world this past month. More
disturbing than the lawsuit itself have been the public statements
by representatives of SCO, which have irresponsibly suggested
doubts about the legitimacy of free software overall.“SCO’s lawsuit asserts that IBM has breached contractual
obligations between the two companies, and also that IBM has
incorporated trade secret information concerning the design of the
UNIX operating system into what SCO calls generally ‘Linux.’ This
latter claim has recently been expanded in extra-judicial
statements by SCO employees and officers to include suggestions
that ‘Linux’ includes material copied from UNIX in violation of
SCO’s copyrights. An allegation to this effect was contained in
letters sent by SCO to 1500 of the world’s largest companies
warning against use of free software on grounds of possible
infringement liability.“It is crucial to clarify certain confusions that SCO’s
spokesmen have shown no disposition to dispel. In the first place,
SCO has used ‘Linux’ to mean ‘all free software,’ or ‘all free
software constituting a UNIX-like operating system.’ This
confusion, which the Free Software Foundation warned against in the
past, is here shown to have the misleading consequences the
Foundation has often predicted. ‘Linux’ is the name of the kernel
most often used in free software systems. But the operating system
as a whole contains many other components, many of them products of
the Foundation’s GNU Project. GNU’s components are copyrighted
works of the Free Software Foundation. GNU includes the C-compiler
GCC, the GDB debugger, the C library Glibc, the bash shell, among
other essential parts. The combination of GNU and the Linux kernel
produces the GNU/Linux system, which is widely used on a variety of
hardware and which taken together duplicates many of the functions
once performed by the UNIX operating system…”
Related Story:
SiliconValley.com:
GPL Legal Battle Coming?(May 21, 2003)