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Progress Report: 1993 Regents v. USL Complaint - Updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

Groklaw is busy working on updating and preserving our collection of documents and information, although the team is keeping the Timeline pages up-to-date, so you can still find all the latest court filings in the litigation we cover there. But it's appropriate from time to time to let you know how the work is going. You'll be happy to know that we're making progress completing our document collection. We'll have both the Comes v. Microsoft and the Gordon v. Microsoft exhibits ready by early next week, I think, if not before. You'll find links to the new collections on our permanent Microsoft Litigation page, once we're done.

And I've been busy going through all our materials, to make sure we haven't overlooked anything of interest. Here's the first find for you, the 1993 Regents of California complaint against USL, with attachments that you'll likely find interesting too. I have obtained it in paper format, and I've scanned it in page by page for you.

The complaint was chiefly regarding proper credit to the University, and as you will see, there's a tie-in to Santa Cruz Operation. The complaint alleged that perhaps as much as 50% of AT&T's System V Release 4 was actually comprised of the University's BSD code. While AT&T had licensed BSD 4.1 in 1983, by 1986 it desired to license 4.2 and 4.3. Exhibit A, the 1986 license agreement between the Regents of the University of California and AT&T, stated that BSD 4.2 and 4.3 included licensed 32V code. And on page 2, the agreement stated that AT&T acknowledged that 4.2 and 4.3 contained proprietary software belonging to the University and that it shall have "no right, title or interest in or to such proprietary software except as expressly set forth in this Agreement".

The Complaint, on page 3, tells us that AT&T wished to license BSD to use in its development of Unix System V, and that it thereby obtained the right to sublicense BSD, which it did to, among others, Santa Cruz Operation, who had failed, according to the Regents, to give the University proper credit. Another sublicensee was Intel, who, the complaint states, failed to give the University proper credit in its "IBCS2". Doesn't this help us to understand how, when SCO showed the code it claimed Linux was infringing at SCOforum 2003, some of it turned out to be BSD 4.3 code?

Full post as published by Groklaw on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).