ZDNet: SCO Smear Campaign Can’t Defeat GNU Community

“SCO’s contract dispute with IBM has been accompanied by a smear
campaign against the whole GNU/Linux system. But SCO made an
obvious mistake when it erroneously quoted me as saying that ‘Linux
is a copy of Unix.’ Many readers immediately smelled a rat–not
only because I did not say that, and not only because the person
who said it was talking about published ideas (which are
uncopyrightable) rather than code, but because they know I would
never compare Linux with Unix.

“Unix is a complete operating system, but Linux is just part of
one. SCO is using the popular confusion between Linux and the
GNU/Linux system to magnify the fear that it can spread. GNU/Linux
is the GNU operating system running with Linux as the kernel. The
kernel is the part of the system that allocates the machine’s
resources to the other programs you run. That part is Linux…

“To copy Unix source code would not be ethically wrong, but it
is illegal; our work would fail to give users lawful freedom to
cooperate if it were not done lawfully. To make sure we would not
copy Unix source code or write anything similar, we told GNU
contributors not even to look at Unix source code while developing
code for GNU…”

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