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Caldera GPLing in 2001, Gave "Open Access" to Open UNIX 8 Source Code

By Pamela Jones et al.

You're going to laugh. I certainly am. Remember when SCO claimed in the SCO v. IBM litigation and to the press that it never knowingly released code under the GPL? We debunked that GPL-virginity story back in 2007, but you'll never guess what I just found, a press release from 2001 on the release of AIM under the GPL and... drum roll... SCO granting "open access" to Open Unix 8 source code. It's titled "Caldera to Open Source AIM Performance Benchmarks, UNIX Regular Expression Parser and Give "Open Access" to Open UNIX 8 Source Code". AIM was released under the GPL. My stars, but SCO is in the following pickle now: it sued IBM for trade secret violation, although it later dropped that claim, then it claimed at trial in the Novell litigation that UnixWare is just the latest version of Unix System V, and we know that Open UNIX is what they called UnixWare briefly in SCO's very complicated history. Connect the dots.

I know! How do you sue anybody for trade secret violations after doing that? Methods and concepts?!? How about SCO's NDA requirements to peek at what they claimed was allegedly infringing code? According to the press release, SCO had a special web page set up where you could go to download the Open UNIX 8 source code. The subhead of the press release was "Open Source Community, Users to Benefit from Access to UNIX Intellectual Property." My dears. How will they explain that away? How do you like this paragraph?

The UNIX Regular Expression Parser is a library function from Open UNIX 8 used by a number of standard UNIX utilities for complex pattern matching of pieces of text. By Open Sourcing this, along with the awk and grep utilities, Caldera begins a process of making some of the original UNIX utilities, upon which the GNU/Linux system was modeled, available as reference sources. This gives the Open Source community an opportunity to reference these implementations and incorporate the best of both source streams into future GPL implementations of these tools.

"Into future *GPL* implementations of these tools"! These guys are a sketch, as my dear grannie used to say. She was very polite, and I'll try to emulate her, but inside, I am guffawing.

I told you it'd be worth it to go through the old stuff we had lying around. By the way, I started out looking for the press release about SCO open sourcing their version of DOS. They did that too. I remembered it, because of Microsoft's FAT patent litigation against TomTom, and I realized that press release wasn't in the Groklaw collection either. So here's the press release on OpenDOS.

Full post as published by Groklaw on March 02, 2009 (boomark / email).