Open Source Blog

There are intellectual property issues with everything, if you let these execs speak

As I think I made clear in my blog, I can't and won't comment on the ruling or on Sun's position.

As you point out, I was entirely concerned with the way Steven J Vaughan-Nichols juxtaposed two quotes in a way which seems misleading to me.

I don't consider that to be good journalism, and I'd hope that this point is uncontroversial, or at least, forgivable!

Matthew: The reason I take issue with SJVN is that there are plenty of people around, including on Slashdot, who know that Sun's rights to Unix were acquired in the early 90s and I can't believe he is not among them.

Whatever effect the current news has (and it's still Sun's policy not to comment on in-progress lawsuits), the core rights that allow OpenSolaris to exist were gained long ago.

Sun may have acquired Unix rights in the 90s, but I can't believe those rights allow Sun to disclose Unix source code, as they have done in Open Solaris.

So, if Sun already had the rights, but paid for them again, would that lend credence to the theory that it was really to help fund efforts to disrupt competing Linux?

Simon -
If what you say is true,
then why did you pay SCO for some "IP rights" ?

you seem to contradict yourselves here.
if you had the rights, you wouldn't need to pay SCO for them, and if you didn't, well, anyhow.

I think the ultimate answer is that whatever Sun got from SCO is invalid, not worth the paper it's printed on, assuming you got paper.

So in that sense, Sun will have to get rights or whatever from Novell.

Everything I know tells me Novell will play nice to further Linux, etc.

Tony, David Smith: Because Unix was not a static "target". The way the Unix licensor role that AT&T and then Novell and ultimately SCO played was to act as a clearing house between all the licensees - remember, this is all pre-open-source.

They would meet with each licensee, identify what drivers, patches and enhancements each party had to offer and then agree a price for the new code so the licensee could use that too - often a complex transaction involving the flow of rights in both directions, which is how the licensor often got the features in the first place.

This was a repeated event that all Unix licensees engaged in at one time or another. As Schwartz explains in one of the articles SJVN links, Sun secured extensive "rights equivalent to ownership" in the early 90s but then like other licensees went on to make a number of further transactions with each of the Unix licensors over the years to stay up-to-date with baseline Unix and to get drivers for common chipsets and devices.

Alan Hinds: Well, there you go. Sun says it bought the rights, Alan Hinds says it didn't. Not much further we can go with that.

Thanks for all the comments and sorry if they were delayed in my absence.

If Simon says Sun got what it needed for OpenSolaris back in the 90s then I've no reason to doubt him, but it does seem that Sun has a communication issue related to this - which is why I asked for comment in the first place.

A simple "we have no issues related to OpenSolaris" would have sufficed and I was surprised the company didn't even offer that.

Put it down to summer inefficiencies, Matthew. I was on holiday when the matter arose and it seems whoever you asked dropped the ball. Apologies.