Trade Secrets Claim Compromised Years Ago

SCO Group Inc. claims in a lawsuit that IBM Inc. purloined proprietary SCO source code and incorporated it as part of the Linux operating system (“SCO Suit May Blunt the Potential of Linux,” June 6).

Actually, as The Times pointed out, the source code base that SCO purchased from Novell (who in turn purchased it from AT&T; Corp.) has long been “enriched” by open source contributions. Most of that enrichment occurred during the time that Unix was an academic product associated with Bell Laboratories.

Universities all over the country, connected by the Arpanet (the direct ancestor of the Internet), contributed solutions and utilities to Unix. The source code was available to any academic who asked, and AT&T; accepted contributions and modifications made by academics (including those at the University of California) and incorporated them into Unix.

All this free interchange ceased when AT&T; decided to convert Unix from an academic endeavor to a product. It sued the University of California Board of Regents over the source for the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) operating system, claiming (as SCO now does to IBM) that the regents had stolen source from Unix to use in BSD.

AT&T; lost its case, with the judge determining that the data flow actually had been from BSD into Unix, and, in particular, that AT&T; had a habitual policy of removing copyright attributions from outside authors before incorporating their works into Unix. Hence, the value of this plagiarized Unix code base in making a trade secrets claim was already compromised years before SCO bought the rights to it.

Douglas Campbell

Culver City