SCO and OpenSolaris

[gdt]

Novell v SCO Group is about to be heard. Novell are contending that SCO Group does not own the copyrights or sublicensing rights to the source code of UNIX System V.

That's a problem for OpenSolaris, as this quote from an interview with Jem Matzan shows:

"What proprietary code had to be taken out of Solaris in preparation for open sourcing it?" McNealy responded by saying that the process of open sourcing Solaris actually started five years ago. "There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code," he said, referring to the February 2003 multimillion-dollar purchase of expanded Unix SVR4 license rights from the SCO Group.

This was a shock at the time, as everyone had thought that Sun had gained a wide-ranging license to the UNIX System V.4 source code through Sun's role in updating SysV during the SysV/BSD Merge Hell which created Solaris, and incidently turned UNIX System V into a workable product.

But Sun obviously thought it lacked sufficient rights. And then purchased those rights from the wrong party. So where's that leave OpenSolaris?

Plan B, of course, is that Sun was simply using the license as an excuse to channel funds to SCO's anti-Linux campaign.