bird,
I admit that I know more about literary copyrights than I do code copyrights. However the basic copyright law is derived from laws meant to protect written works. If Shakespeare had a valid copyright now, one could not take the underling story of Romeo and Juliet, change the setting, the characters names and the method of suicide without having to worry about infringement.
The focus of most Linux commentators is just wrong. The work must also be taken as a whole not just snippet by snippet. If 10 lines of code perform a certain function, it may in fact be a copyright infringement to just rewrite the code to perform the exact function.
It may not be. If the function adds a to b and returns c, the code may be just too general to be a copyright infringement.
If there is many (and I don't know how many) that seem to have been rewritten in essentially the same order doing essentially the same thing, it is easier to sustain a copyright violation.
Brown may very well be a cat’s-paw or minion, I can't tell.
Here's the troubling part as I see it. Tanenbaum as I understand it taught an OS class or wanted to but certainly had access to some version of the Unix kernel. This access was legitimate and proper. He wanted a simpler OS to teach so he created Minix. He published the code (through Prentice Hall, I think) and distributed the source with the executable of Minix.
Torvalds wanted to produce a better kernel. He somehow had to understand what was in the kernel and how it needed to interface with other utilities and compilers. He might have taken a course or examined code to get this understanding. He might have intuited it from observing other OS's. Torvalds says that he ran both Unix and Minix but never derived anything from them.
This may be absolutely true but since others contributed code it is less certain that they did not derive their code or infringe on copyrights.
We do know that the GNU utilities work essentially the same for the Linux kernel as they do for kernels used by AIX, FreeBSD, Solaris, and System V. We do know that Linux is POSIX compliant. Given a clean slate how did this come about? Well others suggested and contributed code to make this happen. The SCO suit claims that IBM was the source of some infringing code.
SCO is claiming it has found vestiges of its copyrighted code to substantiate its claim. I think that it is something in the realm of possibility. The courts will eventually decide this. Even if some code infringes, the relief the court gives may not require a payment to SCO. It may require IBM to pay some money and may require some code to be removed from Linux. bird,
I admit that I know more about literary copyrights than I do code copyrights. However the basic copyright law is derived from laws meant to protect written works.
If Shakespeare had a valid copyright now, one could not take the underling story of Romeo and Juliet, change the setting, the characters names and the method of suicide without having to worry about infringement.
The focus of most Linux commentators is just wrong. The work must also be taken as a whole not just snippet by snippet. If 10 lines of code perform a certain function, it may in fact be a copyright infringement to just rewrite the code to perform the exact function.
It may not be. If the function adds a to b and returns c, the code may be just too general to be a copyright infringement.
If there is many (and I don't know how many) that seem to have been rewritten in essentially the same order doing essentially the same thing, it is easier to sustain a copyright violation.
Brown may very well be a cat’s-paw or minion, I can't tell.
Here's the troubling part as I see it. Tanenbaum as I understand it taught an OS class or wanted to but certainly had access to some version of the Unix kernel. This access was legitimate and proper. He wanted a simpler OS to teach so he created Minix. He published the code (through Prentice Hall, I think) and distributed the source with the executable of Minix.
Torvalds wanted to produce a better kernel. He somehow had to understand what was in the kernel and how it needed to interface with other utilities and compilers. He might have taken a course or examined code to get this understanding. He might have intuited it from observing other OS's. Torvalds says that he ran both Unix and Minix but never derived anything from them.
This may be absolutely true but since others contributed code it is less certain that they did not derive their code or infringe on copyrights.
We do know that the GNU utilities work essentially the same for the Linux kernel as they do for kernels used by AIX, FreeBSD, Solaris, and System V. We do know that Linux is POSIX compliant. Given a clean slate how did this come about? Well others suggested and contributed code to make this happen. The SCO suit claims that IBM was the source of some infringing code.
SCO is claiming it has found vestiges of its copyrighted code to substantiate its claim. I think that it is something in the realm of possibility. The courts will eventually decide this. Even if some code infringes, the relief the court gives may not require a payment to SCO. It may require IBM to pay some money and may require some code to be removed from Linux.
Torvalds might even have a possible claim against IBM for feeding Linux tainted code.
