Toolkit

Story: SCO unveils code 'evidence'

Posted by: Ben Drushell (Wednesday 1 October 2003, 7:11 PM)

This article fails to mention that there are many types of open source software licenses. A small list is available at "http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html".

GPL and LGPL from the Free Software Foundation are popularly used with Linux... however much UNIX code is licensed via a modified BSD style license. Like GPL, a BSD style license allows any company to use the source code for commercial and/or free purposes. The difference is that a BSD style license allows the alteration of source code to remain proprietary (closed-source distribution). As a result, BSD licensed code is favored by companies. UNIX code licensed via a BSD style license is included in most unix and linux type operating systems (including SCO). If code is matching, copied or similar, it might be that SCO (or a previous SCO owner) did the copying from a similar source as is legally available to Linux contributors. SCO does NOT own the efforts of independant developers that released their creations via BSD or GPL open-source licenses.

Questions Remaining Unanswered by SCO:
Does SCO own a particular code copyright?
Was that code ever open-sourced... how and under what terms?
Who owns a particular code derivative copyright?
Was the code ever released into Public Domain making it free and uncopyrightable?