Translation of SCO vs. Linux: Koffer geöffnet, CD verschwunden

SCO vs. Linux: Suitcase opened, CD vanished

About 350 people attended a lecture by SCO employee Gregory Blepp at the University of Jena's Faculty of Communications Sciences, according to its organiser, Jörg Müller-Lietzkow. Blepp spoke for about 90 minutes about intellectual property in the software industry and SCO's role in the various legal disputes around The SCO Group's intellectual property.

In this setting, Blepp, who as vice president of SCOsource is responsible for the entire licensing business with intellectual property licenses outside the US, showed about four pages of code from Linux and SCO, which were to prove similarities between Linux and SCO Unix. Together with the live stream of the event, the university intends to display this code on its website, but awaits SCO's authorisation to do so. According to an estimate by the organiser, around 80 percent of the audience of the event, which was "exceptionally well" attended, could be placed in the Open Source camp, which was well-prepared for the event. These participants claim that the code, which was only shown briefly, might well have been the malloc.c code by Dennis Ritchie.

In a past interview with Spiegel Online, Gregory Blepp had claimed that he carried a suitcase full of evidence with him. As a result of his lecture in Jena, he stressed that this wasn't so much about the code theft, but about the breach of contract IBM had perpetrated.

To the organiser's regret, the ensuing two hour discussion hardly dealt with the role of intellectual property in the knowledge society of the future; the intended subject of the event. This happened because only the well-prepared listeners from the Linux camp asked their questions in a very disciplined and business-like way. Following these questions Blepp also responded critically to problems at the SCO Group. He emphasised that private end-users, schools and other education centres would never have encounter the problem of paying SCO licensing fees. The [multimedia] stream will be published on servers in Jena during the coming week.

Contract and licensing provisions may also play a part in the latest of SCO's products, UnixWare 7.1.4, which was introduced last Tuesday. Missing from this distribution is the fourth CD with the GNU C Compiler and the Linux Kernel Personality module (LKP). Both modules are required for SCO's Unix to behave like a Linux system.

For more information about the battle between SCO, IBM and the Open Source Community, read the article on c't aktuell (with a chronological list of links to articles on heise online, from Technology Review and from c't):

SCO vs. Linux: The Never-ending Story

(Detlef Borchers) / (jk/c't)