Toolkit

Story: SCO keeps disputed code secret

Posted by: Anonymous (Tuesday 16 December 2003, 4:58 PM)

Articles like these are amusing:

1. SCO owns only copyrights, no trade secrets - stated in public court documents. Copyrighted material may be published without SCO loosing any of its existing rights.

2. The order of confidentiality just granted by the court allows SCO to designate material it submits as CONFIDENTIAL, but allows IBM to contest it - which will require SCO to prove exactly why it should be considered so by legal standards. This may be possible to do with their own code, but it is highly unlikely that the court will allow publically available code (BSD, V32, Linux) to be so restricted - being already publicly available, they will likely fail to meet the legal standards required.

3. The legal remedy for stolen copyrighted material MUST include allowing the defendent to remove that material. So SCO must publicly identify the Linux code that they claim right to - which will allow the Open Source community the chance to research and identify the codes legacy....and act accordingly.

If this doen not happen here, it will happen in the Red Hat trial which more directly addresses these exact issues.

4. Release of SCO code is not needed/wanted by the Open Source community. It has no value.

In summary, they portray SCO as having a non-existant victory; "successfully persuaded" was just a normal step in court proceedings for these types of cases. They gained nothing that they were not expected to request - and IBM did not contest it.