[Linux-aus] SCO case may cut both ways, says Unix hacker

[Leon Brooks <leon@cyberknights.com.au>]

Hot off the press from Sam:

    http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062548995285.html

    Said [Greg] Rose: "I was in the University of New South Wales
    way back in the '70s and we wrote code and contributed to the
    Berkeley Software Distribution. Later on, I found that some of
    my code had made its way into Sys V Unix. The attribution had
    been removed." 

    Rose said the same was true of other groups around the world,
    in England and Canada at least. 

    "I don't mind it at all. But this raises the possibiliy that
    code of that vintage - stuff written by people like Ian Johnson
    and Chris Maltby - has also made its way thither. There's no
    credit, and nobody has signed licences to give it away. In
    fact, I'm pretty sure I saw my own code in Sys V in 1984," he
    said.

    "This raises a big question about SCO's claims," said Rose.
    "They may well be guilty of the very same thing which they
    are accusing others of - using code which does not belong to
    them."

    [...]

    Steve Jenkin, a veteran Unix sysadmin who is also attending
    the AUUG conference and was a student at the UNSW in 1977,
    said a lot of the code which went into 2BSD had come from
    the UNSW. "About 60 percent of the code is from UNSW," he
    said. "But when (the University of California at) Berkeley
    started coordinating all efforts at development, the
    copyright notices were taken out and replaced by their
    notices."

    Jenkin said the very first USENIX conference was literally
    one where everyone brought in their own contributions on
    tape and then put then whole lot together. "If you go into
    copyrights as far as Sys V is concerned, it's a terribly
    tangled mess," he said.

Cheers; Leon

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