SCO hits back at OSDL's Linux paper

SCO has rejected claims in a position paper published by the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) that Linux users cannot be subject to SCO licensing or copyright control.

The OSDL paper, entitled Questioning SCO: A Hard Look at Nebulous Claims, was written by copyright law expert Professor Eben Moglen.

He argued that Linux end users cannot be subject to copyright law, and that SCO cannot license them.

But Blake Stowell, SCO's director of public relations, denied the claims.

"Copyright absolutely applies. For the same reason that a commercial user must have a valid licence to run Microsoft Word, a user must also have a valid licence to run our Unix source code," he told vnunet.com.

Professor Moglen claimed that the General Public Licence (GPL), under which Linux is distributed, allowed users to modify Linux code.

But Stowell insisted that the GPL only applied to Linux, not to the Unix code which, SCO claims, was added to Linux.

He maintained that SCO had identified specific derivative Unix software contributed to Linux by IBM. This included read-copy-update, non-uniform memory access and journalled file system.

"While IBM owns the copyrights on these derivative Unix programs, SCO owns the control rights to these and they cannot be contributed to open source. The contracts between IBM and SCO state all of this," explained Stowell.

He added that the reason why SCO has not shown the offending code publicly is "because we require all of our Unix licensees to keep this code in confidence for their own business purposes".

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