Intellectual Property Law

"PATCH: ELF registry now at Caldera" in 2002 and LKP and GNU Tools

By Pamela Jones et al.

It's a June 5, 2002 message posted by Lars Brinkhoff with that very subject line: "PATCH: ELF registry now at Caldera" in the mail archive of the binutils@sources.redhat.com mailing list for the GNU binutils project. It's in answer to a message from Hans-Peter Nilsson, saying that he couldn't figure out how to "get in touch with ELF people".

Brinkhoff shares an email he received from Dave Prosser at Caldera, after he wrote to registry@caldera.com. I believe it's more evidence that when Caldera distributed binutils in OpenLinux and in other products, it was not by mistake or without knowledge of what was in there. And they knew it was and is licensed under the GPL. Note that this is after the date, 1995, that SCO claimed was significant regarding ELF. Of course, Ralf Flaxa already told the Utah court in a Declaration filed in the SCO v. IBM case that Caldera knew what it was distributing in Linux, because he worked for Caldera then and he knew:

28. I understand that SCO claims that certain materials in Linux infringe SCO's alleged intellectual property, specifically: header files required by the Open Group's Single Unix Specification (SUS), header files relating to the Streams technology, and files and specifications relating to the Executable and Linking Format (ELF).

29. While employed at Caldera, I was aware that this material was present in Linux. I know so because of my familiarity with Linux and also because Caldera incorporated it into its Linux products.

30. Caldera distributed significant parts of its Linux products under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

But it's nice to see external confirmation, so it's not a matter of dueling witnesses. And as I'll show you, there's something new, to me anyway, about the LKP, the Linux Kernel Personality. I found a Caldera/Santa Cruz 2001 press release that says GNU tools were put in LKP and that then LKP was "incorporated" into the UnixWare 7 kernel used for Open UNIX 8. I confess a new interest in LKP.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).