Slashdot Mirror
Analysis of SCO vs. IBM
icantblvitsnotbutter writes "An excellent -- and clear! -- article over at LinuxWorld.com has a multipoint analysis of SCO's 40-page complaint (this is a brief?!). For all those IANAL's out there, here's something to sink your teeth into. On the balance, the outlook seems positive for IBM. Still, the parallel invocation of a contractural clause potentially nixing AIX lends some credence to claims that this is a just way for SCO to coerce IBM into buying them out..." Some old documents from a similar lawsuit have surfaced, and naturally ESR has his own take on the case.
What I would have really liked is something on the lines of "Here is patent number 1" and here is how linux is different/same.....It is not as if SCO patent reads like "WE patent UNIX and everything that looks like it. And that is that
Quoting from the SCO complaint;
18. SCO is the present owner of all software code and licensing rights to System V Technology.
Pretty much summarises what they are saying.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Amicus Curiae
Definition: Latin term meaning "friend of the court". The name for a brief filed with the court by someone who is not a party to the case
I don't remember it this was posted already in previous discussions, but in this interview with IBM Kernel Hackers from last year, some points are raised, some good and some bad for IBM, specially in the 2nd question. In short, the people at IBM that was into the linux kernel development can't take parts of i.e. AIX code and put into Linux and viceversa, but some interchange of ideas could have been happened if a developer of one team talks with one of another.
Black's Legal Dictionary defines amicus curiae: "A person with a strong interest in or views on the subject matter of an action may petition the court for permission to file a brief ostensibly on behalf of a party, but actually to suggest a rationale consistent with its own views. Such amicus curiae briefs are commonly filed in appeals concerning matters of broad public interest; e.g. civil rights cases".
I found this item here.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
One trivia point: SCO's SMP implementation was not written by SCO but was licensed from Corollary.
Two more i386 ports that ESR has forgotten about: Altos (later purchased by Acer). I was one of the engineers that ported SCO 3.2.0 (or was it 3.2.2?) to the Altos 1000 (see Google groups for info). The second is the "Sun 386i" 80386 computer which everybody seems to have forgotten about. Again, see Google groups.
IMHO the only thing of value SCO was to contribute to Monterey was the X server.
I believe that from a legal standpoint AIX is licensed SVR3 code (although having seen AIX kernel code, SCO OpenServer and UnixWare source, and "pure" virgin SVR3 code I can attest that AIX is a complete overhaul and bears no resemblence to pure SVR3 (or SVR4) except in the bowels of STREAMS).
full disclosure: ex-SCO employee who worked on all kernels including Monterey prior to Caldera.
Perhaps. But if I were you, do what I did: download the kernel changelogs for 2.4 (and if you like 2.2) and grep them for ibm.com (i.e. commits from someone at IBM).
For example, I fetch the changelogs from here. And then I ran:
in the directory containing the changelogs to get the filenames with commits from an IBM email address. Use a pager with regexp search capability (like 'less') to view the files, in this case the changelogs for 2.4.19 and 2.4.20.What?!? You're not running linux?!? Shame on you!
As you will see, most of the checkins involve bug fixes for IBM's JFS, some patches for IPV6, and few ones for s390. Gotta love version control, eh?
Project Monterey was a plan that never happened. It was a plan to put Unix on IA-64 machines that died during conception. What we have is a lot of white papers on the subject but no written, working code. Of course I could be wrong, and if there was working code it would have probably been written by IBM developers anyway with a "Copyright (c) 2000 IBM Corp." near the top of the sources.
Probably, but one of the accusations SCO makes is that IBM allegedly handed out Unix code owned by SCO to Linux kernel hackers. And that Linux would not have advanced if IBM had not handed out said code. But so far, all code commits from IBM appear to be mostly patches to existing code. What's more SCO accuses IBM of handing out code from SCO Unix to improve Linux's SMP capabilities. However, Linux's SMP support was one of the primary reasons why IBM adopted Linux in the first place (for proof, see my earlier post in this thread). Ergo, by adopting an Open, Freely Available variant of Unix with SMP support would lessen their development efforts.
What I find rather interesting is Caldera's Logo on the IA-64 Linux page. And it lists them as one of the players in this project. And even more interesting is the missing links on SCO's website pointing to details of the Itanium Netfarm they have presumably made available to IA-64 Linux developers.
- casts polymorph other spell on grue... 0xB00F!
UnixWare to Linux Porting Guide (development tools and the API)
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/sco-porting.pdf