Yes, Hot(ish) off the presses is SCO’s latest Memoranda. Courtsey of Groklaw, we get the news that SCO now claim that they never said that IBM had infringed SCO copyrights by contributing to Linux. Instead the residual copyright claim is simply that IBM continued to use AIX and Dynix after SCO had ‘revoked’ the license (yes, the fully paid up, perpetual license, that’s the one!).So here we are a year on from the times Darl started categorically stating that IBM made contributions to Linux of code owned by SCO. Apparently not. No. Nosireee. But someone did. Oh yes. Yessss. Yes yes yes.
The most strange thing is that they still claim the violations did occur, but they seem unable to pinpoint who it is that contributed and want to concentrate on secondary infringers.
This is evident in the same memoranda which asserts that the Autozone case is the copyright infringement case. Why? AutoZone know nothing about the kernel and have never contributed anything to it: How could they be guilty of the primary copyright infrinmgement.
It looks like the simple facts are that SCO have had a year to scan the codebase of Linux for infringements and have not found any (Hooray!).
Public and industry opinion is certainly turning against SCO. Today another huge organisation made statements that they beleive the SCO claims to be without merit.
Of coursse there is so much going on that the cases are very far from over. Gradually though, it seems that the community is winning!
TurboTas 2004