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The "one line of code" rule - Any UnixWare in SCOsource?

By Pamela Jones et al.

In Judge Dale Kimball's recent order in SCO v. Novell, he accepted SCO's story about licensing practices. I think that was a mistake, and I'd like to show you why I think so. Here's what he wrote:

UNIX licensees often distributed and used binary products that included code from multiple releases of System V. Novell and its successors required and allowed such licensees to pay only one set of royalties for the use or distribution of such a product. To identify the proper license under which such a product could be used or distributed and to calculate the appropriate royalty payments required for using or distributing such a product, Novell and its successors employed the "one line of code" rule.

Under the "one line of code" rule, Novell and then SCO determined whether there was as little as one line of code from the latest release of System V (including UnixWare) contained in a binary product and then calculated royalty payments for the entire product under that latest license. Novell and then SCO prohibited licensees from parsing out the relative amounts of code from different releases of System V and paying portions of the requisite royalties under multiple System V licenses.

Now let me show you what I found regarding how SCO, Santa Cruz, billed in complex situations, according to what it told the SEC.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).