Cute.
From the department of "there are going to be some unintended consequences coming out of this one", a court has apparently said that, no, SCO lost control of their Unix copyrights when they merged with Caldera in 1995.
This has some spiffy consequences outside the realm of "you piss off a judge, you lose your intellectual property" that the frothing Linux fanboys at Groklaw have probably not considered. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2002 agreement to release all of the ancient Unices under a BSD-style license. If, as this court claims, SCO lost their Unix copyright as a result of their merger in 1995, there's no way they can change their licensing terms and release the code to the world.
So I can't ship vi anymore, or any of the other programs I've lifted from the ancient Unices and put into Mastodon. This probably doesn't matter to the fanboys, because they won't touch anything that isn't GPLed, but it's an extraordinarily annoying roadblock on my path to newer and better tiny versions
of Mastodon, because now I need to go into OpenSolaris and see if I can reconstruct those programs from the now-BSDGPLed descendants of the Sun branch of the ancient Unix code (this branch happened in 1994, thank Ghu, so it's safe, for now, from this particular bit of property reassignment.)
I'm not going to even think about the implications of "you merged? Oh, all your copyrights went away, sorry!" but I think I hear shrieks of laughter coming from the Microsoft corporate offices as their senior officers get ready to go out and celebrate this unexpected, but delightful, mid-august surprise.
Comments
May not? No, it’s definitely does not; if SCO doesn’t have the copyright, they can’t change the copying rights.
If I was a Caldera stockholder, I’d be thinking about suing Novell into the ground because the SCO purchase without the Unix copyright would have been worth much MUCH less than whatever Caldera paid to gain possession of SCO. And if Novell decides that Caldera was actually correct in the original claims that the Linux kernle contains stolen Unix source code (that was their original complaint, which rapidly got buried in an increasingly ridiculous stack of silly paranoid accusations) then they get to turn around and, yes, sue the pants off everyone who uses Linux (except, possibly, their dear friend and patron IBM) because, and this is kind of important, the original claim of theft is not resolved by this court action.
So, from my viewpoint the situation has changed from a street drunk arguing with a lamppost (starring SCO as the drunk, the rest of the world as the lamppost; in my interaction with the commercial Linux world, *nobody cared* that SCO was peeing in the street) to (a) no BSD licensing of the ancient Unix code, (b) a nasty copyright infringement claim that has not been resolved, and © the copyright in the hands of a company that has already purged itself of industrial grade crazies and which has their own version of the OS and a tasty we’re-the-official-Linux-of™ contract with a very large hardware manufacturer.
SCO is harmless. Novell might be harmless, or it might not. And I’ve lost the legal rights to a large body of source code that I was using. There’s no win here.
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The courts finding was not that SCO lost control after the Caldera merger of certain copyrights obtained from Novell but that SCO never held those copyrights in question in the first place. The licensing agreement with Novell excluded transfer of the actual copyright ownership.
This still seems to leave you with the practical problem that SCO may not have the authority under their license with Novell to re-license the source code as BSD, barring a good-will move by Novell to remove any doubt that the BSD licensing can stand. However, this could be a problem for any license change without a solid chain of ownership, for various values of solid.
Note that either way the reaction you project onto Microsoft does not follow, since they have not been averse to acquiring intellectual property from outside of the company. Any loss of copyright in a merger-and-acquisition scenario would be damaging to them as well (if there was an opponent with a sufficiently deep legal team).