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OpenServer Copyright Ownership

By Pamela Jones et al.

In Judge Dale Kimball's July 2008 order in SCO v. Novell, he described OpenServer like this:

E. OpenServer

OpenServer is the brand name for the release of UNIX System V, Release 3 that Santa Cruz developed in the 1980s. Novell never owned, or had any license to, OpenServer. OpenServer was Santa Cruz's flagship product through the 1990s. OpenServer produces two-thirds of SCO's UNIX revenue and has thousands of customers, including small to mid-sized businesses and large corporations, such as McDonald's.

I think that isn't completely accurate. SCO began declaring their full ownership thereafter, but it's not that simple a story. Santa Cruz was, after all, a licensee, using AT&T's -- later Novell's -- UNIX System V Release 3 code. So obviously not all the code in OpenServer would belong, in the copyright sense, to SCO. In fact, we would expect that we'd find copyrights belonging to AT&T and Novell. And we do. Let me show you.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 15, 2009 (boomark / email).