LawFont.com

Groklaw is reporting that it has a copy of a 13 August 2002 email from an expert hired by SCO to look into whether any code had been copied from AT&T Unix into Linux.

It is interesting reading and does not bode well for SCO. The money quote: “At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.”

It is interesting reading and does not bode well for SCO. The money quote: “At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.”

Further excerpts read:

“The actual investigation itself was done by an outside consultant (Bob Swartz) hired by SCO. …

…

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” somewhere in code that was being used by Red Hat and/or the other Linux companies that would give us some leverage. …

Note that the scope of the project was limited to looking for evidence of copyright infringement … besides SCO was *sure* that it was going to find evidence of copyright violations which are comparatively straightforward to prove once you have found them…

An outside consultant was brought in because I had already voiced the opinion … that it was a waste of time and that we were not going to find anything.

Bob worked on the project for (I think) 4 to 6 months …

At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.

There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and Linux … but invariably it turned out that the common code was something that both we (SCO) and the Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party.”

Davidson is right about it being easy to prove infringement once copying is found; the hard thing is to find copying. For that, you usually need access to the source code.