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September 03, 2003

More AUUG links

It turns out that the president of AUUG has a web diary and some more photos from the hotel (top two photos on the page).

I attended the tutorial he gave on Monday the 1st (all about kernel debugging).

From the SCO stoush, I just have a few links (I may rant about this later): SCO's opinion (we were shown a few slides from this presentation), Bruce Peren's comments (Bruce was not presented but got a few mentions), Greg Lehey's notes. I don't have any links yet for the third speaker (Con Zamaris).

My key contention was not addressed in the meeting: As a Unix geek (> 20 years) I have used Unix servers with source code (V6) while at university. I wrote code at university on theses boxes - in fact that is where I learned to program in C. Fragments of that original code have reappeared time and time again over my career, either because I did not want to rewrite things or because the problem/solution space matched a previous programming task. According to SCO, although they do not "own" my code, everything I have ever written is subject to a SCO licence. In other words, you cannot use my code without purchasing a multi-thousand dollar ($US) licence from SCO - in addition. of course. to anything you may have paid me to write the code in the first place. Obviously this is a nonsense stance on the part of SCO but it is (at least in the short term) a fairly disruptive claim for me and my clients. SCO also claim that this means that I have no rights to give away my code ...

Posted by Ozguru at September 3, 2003 03:09 PM

Comments

Interesting side point. One person present at the debate was Greg Rose who in 1976 (?) was working at UNSW on Unix. He made substantive changes which later turned up in the BSD vs AT&T fight as being BSD code (BSD had stripped off his copyright messages). The same code also appears in SysV (and is presumably, now in the code claimed by SCO. Greg wanted to know what SCO would think if he went to IBM and reached an independant settlement with them - note that should SCO win against IBM, then he would have some form of a case against SCO...

Posted by: Ozguru at September 3, 2003 03:09 PM

If you are wondering what happens at a Unix Geek Conference, the timetable is on-line here. Remember that Sydney time is 10 hours East of GMT. You can check the time zones here.

Posted by: Ozguru at September 3, 2003 03:09 PM