The SCO Letter Lies
The letter SCO sent to Fortune 1000 companies today says in part:
The ABI Code identified above is part of the UNIX Derived Files and, as such, must carry USL / SCO copyright notices and may not be used in any GPL distribution, inasmuch as the affirmative consent of the copyright holder has not been obtained, and will not be obtained, for such a distribution under the GPL. (emphasis mine)
Assume for a moment that SCO does hold the copyright on these files (which I seriously doubt). Then the italicized portion is simply false. These files are part of the Linux distribution. Caldera (part of SCO) distributed Linux and these very files under the GPL. So, SCO has already given the permission they now claim that they have not given. Their have been a number of subtle contradictions in their statements since this all started, but this one is blatant. And recall that’s only on the assumption they hold the copyright on these files at all. VERY doubtful. The Slashdot crowd has probably already shown that claim to be false too.
UPDATE: Sorry. I was wrong. Linus himself already proved they don’t hold the copyright on these files.
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