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• BSD (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25) on 2004.03.03 16:36 (#29032) Journal

  And how long before SCO starts poking around in the BSD source?

  BSD sources have a pretty strong dose of anti-fud, thanks to the AT&T vs. UCBerkeley suit from last decade. My memory is rusty, and IANAL, but I seem to remember one of the criteria of the settlement is that BSD remove the code in about 4 files, and AT&T drop all claims going forward that there's any copyright violation in that code tree. This was after the judge intimated that AT&T's suit was without merit, and he would likely rule against the telco.

  Now the astronomically remote possibility remains that someone idiotic could have leaked SCO source into a BSD code tree, but realistically speaking (a) why, and (b) only modifications after the settlement would be germane. Remember that the "smoking gun" SCO danced out last summer was from an ancient Unix release that someone at SGI stupidly added to a kernel branch that never went anywhere. Even if such code were found in a BSD tree, chances are fairly good it would be off the table, as per the terms of the previous suit.

  To my eyes, that makes any accusation against BSD a lot less likely to stick. And the BSD community doesn't really have a sugardaddy like IBM to sue, so the benefit of such a lawsuit is harder to justify, even for SCO.

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