Hmmm.... SCO is certainly making life unpleasant for many.  -Mike


 From BYTE.COM newsletter:

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1. Special Feature: SCO Owns Your Computer
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Fittingly, it was Friday the 13th. A sunny San Francisco morning.
But my discussion with Chris Sontag, SCO's Senior Vice President,
Operating Systems Division, was driving the sunshine from our
room, creating an atmosphere appropriate for the 13th. Let me
summarize in a parable...

In the beginning was AT&T Bell Labs, staffed by a benevolent team
of PhDs and research scientists. AT&T produced this really neat
operating system--System V--which computer manufacturers wanted to
license and use. Everybody was happy to sign tough contracts with
these benevolent scientists--licenses which deeded all derivative
works back to AT&T, licenses that covered all "methods" and
"concepts" of operating systems. But now those licenses are owned
by SCO and its team of lawyers who are certain that AIX and all
the other IXs belong to SCO. And the company now wants royalties
from users of all these operating systems--especially Linux.

Specifically, Sontag believes the "SCO technologies" which were
misappropriated into AIX, IRIX, and the derivative UNIX-alikes
(including Linux) are:

    * JFS (Journalling File System).
    * NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access), a SGI/Stanford collaboration.
    * RCU (Read-Copy-Update).
    * SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing).

"But what about BSD?" I asked. Sontag responded that there
"could be issues with the [BSD] settlement agreement," adding that
Berkeley may not have lived up to all of its commitments under the
settlement.

"So you want royalties from FreeBSD as well?" I asked. Sontag
responded that "there may or may not be issues. We believe that
UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent
computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived
from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual
property)."

"So is anybody clean? What about Apple and Microsoft?" I wondered.
"Sun is clean," he said--but he gave no answer in regards to Apple
and Microsoft.

"But I thought that Microsoft had signed a license agreement?" "No,"
Sontag said. Microsoft merely licensed an "applications interface layer."

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