Does SCO own the copyrights to the UNIX source code?
SCO may own copyrights to some of the ancestral UNIX code, as successor in interest to AT&T. However, the extent of those rights is unclear. According to a 1993 court ruling, UNIX System Laboratories (a spinoff from AT&T) had “failed to demonstrate a likelihood that it can successfully defend its copyright in 32V.” The terms of the eventual settlement, though not publicly disclosed, were widely viewed as a crashing defeat for USL. The 1993 ruling would of course not apply to any code written subsequently. Modifications to code that was covered by the 1993 ruling are a gray area, and would have to be considered on a case by case basis. According to Ransom Love, a co-founder of Caldera (now SCO), much of the code in UNIX is copyrighted by other companies. If so, SCO cannot claim ownership of all the UNIX copyrights. Furthermore, Novell has also claimed copyrights on much of the same UNIX code. These conflicting claims have yet to be resolved in court.
