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An AutoZone Chart and A Santa Cruz License Agreement

By Pamela Jones et al.

I've done a chart for you, showing SCO's new First Amended Complaint [PDF] against long-suffering AutoZone, with AutoZone's Answer [PDF], so you can see them side by side, paragraph by paragraph. I thought that might help us get a handle on what it's now about. We did another chart for you earlier showing SCO's original complaint against AutoZone compared to the new one, so this completes that trilogy.

SCO hasn't changed at all. It hasn't backed off at all. The complaint, however, has changed, and the changes are to cover its back because the Utah District Court ruled that Novell didn't transfer copyrights to Santa Cruz in 1995. At least that is how it strikes me. So it has added two copyrights to its list of registered copyrights, UNIX System V: release 4.2MP (the version that was highlighted in SCO v. Novell) and SCO OpenServer: release 5.0.5. That's because SCO now alleges copyright infringement but also a contract claim related to OpenServer. The other thing that has changed since SCO filed this amended complaint is that SCO management has been replaced by the Chapter 11 trustee, and so we don't know yet if this case will even go forward now. It's up to him, not former management. However, you can see what they *would* have done, if it had been up to them, namely continue to sue Linux end users, not just AutoZone, and this was intended to be the template, I gather. They wanted this to be an object lesson: pay SCO for using Linux. Like I said, they haven't changed at all.

Full post as published by Groklaw on September 07, 2009 (boomark / email).