Journal molarmass192's Journal: SCO: Did SCOs Own Developers Submit the "Copied" Code?
Looks like SCO's case against Linux had yet another leg kicked out from under it. Due to some craft detective work, it appears that basis of virtually all of the infringing code SCO claims is in Linux was actually contributed by SCO developers post-Caldera acquisition.
This particular link details many submissions by Chris Hellwig while employed by SCO. These submissions appear to center around ABI and JFS, both points of infringement according to SCO.
This second link details the submissions of Tigran Aivazian which center on the Kernel core and microcode.
If these developers contributed code to Linux, it's entirely likely that they used that same code back in the SCO product line. In this case, there was no misappropriation as SCO currently claims and the issue is effectively moot.
With regards to the GPL and copyrights, there is a Copyright notice in the Linux kernel code from Caldera. Remember, Linux is the "program/work" released under the GPL, each individual file need not bear a copyright notice. Also, a quick grep reveals that there are many contributions from "sco.com", "caldera.com", and "caldera.de" email addresses. That said, SCO has stated that the 2.2 kernel is not infringing, this means that the infringing code was inserted in the 2.4 timeframe which dates to January 30, 2001. The oldest development release of 2.4 I could locate was dated August 11, 2000. Not so ironically, Caldera purchased SCO on August 2, 2000, so code donated by Caldera from the SCO code base to 2.4.0 would fall under the GPL. All that time between August and January was available for Caldera (ie. ex-SCO) developers to donate SCO code to Linux.
This particular link details many submissions by Chris Hellwig while employed by SCO. These submissions appear to center around ABI and JFS, both points of infringement according to SCO.
This second link details the submissions of Tigran Aivazian which center on the Kernel core and microcode.
If these developers contributed code to Linux, it's entirely likely that they used that same code back in the SCO product line. In this case, there was no misappropriation as SCO currently claims and the issue is effectively moot.
With regards to the GPL and copyrights, there is a Copyright notice in the Linux kernel code from Caldera. Remember, Linux is the "program/work" released under the GPL, each individual file need not bear a copyright notice. Also, a quick grep reveals that there are many contributions from "sco.com", "caldera.com", and "caldera.de" email addresses. That said, SCO has stated that the 2.2 kernel is not infringing, this means that the infringing code was inserted in the 2.4 timeframe which dates to January 30, 2001. The oldest development release of 2.4 I could locate was dated August 11, 2000. Not so ironically, Caldera purchased SCO on August 2, 2000, so code donated by Caldera from the SCO code base to 2.4.0 would fall under the GPL. All that time between August and January was available for Caldera (ie. ex-SCO) developers to donate SCO code to Linux.
