RE: SCO's copyright claims or lack thereof (was: Re: Linux v2.6.9 and GPL Buyout)

["David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com>]

> Just for everyone's information... this is a bit long, but ends up arguing
> that, if Caldera/SCO had a shred of evidence of copyright infringeent,
> they would heva introduced it in court by now.

	It seems pretty clear at this point that SCO has no actual copyright or
patent claims against code that is in the Linux kernel. All they have are
theft of trade secret and violation of the spirit of the contract type
claims against those entities that have had direct contact with SCO (and
thus could steal their trade secrets or violate their contracts with them).

	If there is one possibly good thing that has come out of the SCO fiasco, it
is a greater awareness of the risk of copyright infringement, especially
with open source code. Had SCO actually held copyright to any work that
actually wound up in the Linux kernel, we would all be at risk of serious
liability. One can even envision a situation where someone maliciously (but
with plausible deniability) allows their copyrighted expression to get into
an open source project to create the ability to go after people who
otherwise would have no interest in using their code.

	People who control the input of new source into large open source projects
do need to be vigilant with regard to the copyright and patent status of
that code.

	DS