Three scientists took the train northwards from England to attend a multi-disciplinary conference in Edinburgh.
Conversation flagged as the journey continued, until some time after crossing the border into Scotland when the social scientist, used to seeing Friesan herds in the south, pointed out some Highland cattle.
"Oh, look", he said, "the cows are brown in Scotland!"
The physicist put down the newspaper and looked out of the window.
"Yes, so I see, but your remark isn't scientific, you know. You can't know that all the cows are brown. What do you think, Bob?"
Bob the mathematician glanced up over his glasses at the grazing cattle.
"Observation shows that, through this window, at least one side of some bullocks in Scotland appears brown".
Moral: question your assumptions.
As AC points out, I WAS talking in my first reply about whether or not SCOG could be said to own the code, not on the fact of copying or derivation from anywhere.
I'd add another point to your list of So:
-Even if they owned the code and even if some lines of it were infringed and even if Novell's waiver doesn't hold, SCOG went on distributing *the same code* under the GPL for years after they started suing folk (IBM, Novell, Autozone, RedHat...).
I've got a licence for the Linux kernel from Caldera/SCOG already. As SCOG's lawyer said in his summing up for the jury trial in Utah, SCOSource is gone and it can't be resurrected.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100326184700459
From the link:
The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York. The Department is only providing the following selected text from the manual because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism.
So it seems the US Department of Justice is fairly clear that this is suitable for the public domain, and if it's been introduced as evidence, it's squarely IN the public domain.
Then from the TFA:
On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes.
It seems that the Plod haven't even followed up on their sources.
Now, I haven't got the bottle to actually download any of those PDFs (to here in the UK). However, some clueless folk are going to get some real interesting tinyurls real soon now.
PS also from the link:
WTF? There's no such organization as the Manchester Metropolitan Police. The force is called the Greater Manchester Police.The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.