Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Groklaw

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

What SCOsource was for, Part III

By Pamela Jones et al.

Sometimes when I have a moment free, I check on older materials to make sure that links still work and that transcripts and various documents made it to the light. There is so much work involved in doing Groklaw that sometimes I have to drop things when there is heavy news happening, and so I try to swing back and finish later.

In looking over our collection of transcripts of conference calls, I realized that I never published our transcript of SCO's December 22, 2003 fourth quarter conference call. I hadn't finished proofing it, I realized, and SCO claimed that no one had the right to reproduce the call without their permission, and without the mp3, I felt uncomfortable. But I noticed with a start that CEO Darl McBride took questions regarding SCOsource, and in the course of the Q&A, he specifically clarified that with regard to the companies that SCO was meeting with about alleged Unix code in Linux that were customers of SCO's, it was not about UnixWare. Here's what McBride said:

Again, even when you go to the ... when we talk about thousands of Unix licensees, you know, the people we are out meeting with on this, are not really our customers per se, on the OpenServer and Unixware side. Those guys are already buying products from us, most of those are not using Linux, so they're independent ... they're really separate from this.

So there you have it. I think one can therefore rely upon his words that any UNIX licensee who signed up for a SCOsource license, such as Sun, at least up until December of 2003, was not buying anything related to Unixware.

Full post as published by Groklaw on February 16, 2008 (boomark / email).