"Ever since the day that SCO made their claims public through their court filing against IBM, we have been asking SCO to tell us precisely what FSF copyrighted code they believe contains their trade secrets (or for that matter, infringes on their copyrights or patents). SCO has refused to answer us or give us any details. As far as we know, there are no such claims.

"Indeed, FSF holds documents from SCO regarding some of this code. SCO has disclaimed copyright on changes that were submitted and assigned by their employees to key GNU operating system components. Why would SCO itself allow their employees to assign copyright to FSF, and perhaps release SCO's supposed 'valuable proprietary trade secrets' in this way?-- Bradley Kuhn, 2003-05-22

"For nearly two decades, the FSF has carefully and arduously collected copyright assignments on each contribution to the GPL'ed programs on which we hold copyright. We carry out due diligence to ask contributors if they have any reason to believe that trade secrets, patents, or other copyright claims cover their work before they submit it to us. We then collect a copyright assignment from the contributor (and a copyright disclaimer from their employer when necessary) to ensure that we hold proper title to the software on which we place our copyright notice and license freely under GPL or LGPL.

"Individuals and companies using FSF copyrighted programs know as much as one can know that the software has been examined carefully, that its authors certify that the work is their own, and that the authors have no knowledge of other claims conflicting with its licensing under GPL or LGPL."-- Bradley Kuhn, 2003-05-22

"SCO was not merely a distributor of the kernel named Linux; they were the distributor off the entire GNU/Linux system, which includes Linux as well as the core components of the GNU operating system, such as glibc, GCC, GDB, etc.

"Most of the core GNU components are all copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation and distributed under our auspices under GPL. SCO's right to redistribute them, and Linux too, is the GNU GPL and only the GNU GPL."-- Bradley Kuhn, 2003-05-22