SCO's internally found no Linux infringment
We have obtained the August 13, 2002 Michael Davidson email to Reg Broughton, who forwarded it to Darl McBride with a cover note. It was previously sealed, and you can see why SCO would want it to be. It records Davidson's memories of Bob Swartz' earlier months-long code comparison between Linux and several versions of AT&T's Unix for SCO.
Davidson reports:The project was a result of SCO's executive management refusing to believe that it was possible for Linux and much of the GNU software to have come into existance without *someone* *somewhere* having copied pieces of proprietary UNIX source code to which SCO owned the copyright. The hope was that we would find a "smoking gun" somwhere in code that was being used by Red Hat and/or the other Linux companies that would give us some leverage. (There was, at one stage, the idea that we would sell licenses to corporate customers who were using Linux as a kind of "insurance policy" in case it turned out that they were using code which infringed our copyright).
So, Darl's SCOsource scheme wasn't even original, was it? SCO *hoped* to find copyright infringement so they could make some money selling "insurance" for Linux, the email says. Sound familiar? And after all that effort, what did they find?At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.
SCO hired outside consultants to review the available code, the consultants found nothing. Every bit of common code was something both OSs had copied legally from somebody else. SCO decided to sue anyway.
Hopefully this blows up in SCO's face.
Jay
