Mailing-List:	contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe:	<mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive:	<http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post:	<mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help:	<mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/#faqs>
Sender:	cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To:	mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
X-Injected-Via-Gmane:	http://gmane.org/
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From:	Andrew DeFaria <Andrew AT DeFaria DOT com>
Subject:	SCO/IBM legal issues
Date:	Sat, 09 Aug 2003 09:23:20 -0700
Lines:	36
Message-ID:	<bh378k$pek$1@main.gmane.org>
Mime-Version:	1.0
X-Complaints-To:	usenet AT main DOT gmane DOT org
User-Agent:	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)
X-Accept-Language:	en,ru

This probably doesn't effect Cygwin at all since AFAICT the SCO claims 
are about the Linux kernel and Cygwin has no real kernel as per se, 
however SCO seems to be just about challenging the whole GPL concept. 
Briefly SCO claims that since it owns the rights to certain pieces of 
Unix (through a long trail of interesting history of Unix) and since it 
worked with IBM that IBM effectively stole either parts of System V code 
or used what it learned to contribute to the Open Source movement and 
into the Linux kernel. SCO is now seeking to extract a hefty license fee 
from Linux users!

Initially I thought that this was just a bogus claim but on reading some 
of the court documentation it seems that SCO might have a legal point. 
 From what I understand it hinges on the fact the SCO and IBM worked on 
a project called Project Monterey where they jointly were working on 
getting *nix working on Intel 64 bit chips. IBM later abandoned the 
project and hooked up with Linux. IBM made a few statements about taking 
what it learned from AIX and from Project Monterey to "contribute" to 
the Open Source movement and particularly the Linux OS so as to help 
Linux handle the enterprise environment with multiple CPUs and other 
high processing needs. To do this they would effectively contributed 
their learned "know how", learned from their affiliation with SCO and 
the System V sources, directly into Linux's source base. To me this is 
sorta like not directly stealing the copyrighted code you may have 
developed for Company X but using what you've learned at Company X to 
re-write the code at Company Y. Company X does have a legal write to sue 
for theft of "intellectual property".

What does this all have to do with Cygwin? Well Cygwin comes from Redhat 
and Redhat has recently thrown it's hat into the ring WRT the SCO/IBM 
battle. Perhaps that's why we don't hear much from people here (and 
maybe they aren't allowed to talk about it). But what does this all say 
about Open Source in general? Are projects such as Cygwin, Mozilla, et. 
al. now all possibly subject to previous employers making intellectual 
property claims if their current or former employees contribute to Open 
Source?



--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/

- Raw text -