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SCO Claims Kernel Contains UnixWare Code
ergo98 writes "SCO has increased the intensity of the lawsuit with IBM by claiming to hold indisputable proof that copyrighted UnixWare code found its way into Linux, violating the rules of both camps. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen: SCO refuses to divulge the code in question, however they promise to reveal it in court shortly."
The fact that a) they were looking for it and b) found it, leads me to suspect it might (assuming it exists at all) be SCO or someone at SCO.
That's the beauty of open-source. It's wide open, and well documented.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
One would think that SCO has enough version control to know what they have, when they got it and where it came from. That would be assuming alot with them though.
Repeatedly over the past few days, they have provided a moving target as to what they they are claiming as thier IP. First it was IBM, then it was the OSS Linux community as a whole, and now they are saying it is the distros.
How typical. A bunch of dumbasses that could never have corperate direct now cannot even give thier litigation a sure direction for one day.
Note to SCO: Go back to drinking your Provo Girl beer, watching forest fires and making bad Linux distros. This is turing into a joke for you that you will NEVER recover come.
You will not own the community, you sure as hell won't IBM, and if I was IBM, I sure as would not want to purchase a company full of directionless assholes.
Give it up guys. All your linux are belong to us should not be anyone's mission statement.
"Lithuanian gutter weed or blunt from Portland...which do think the Blazers like?"
Even if this is true, shouldn't they have contacted Linus and had him remove the offending code? I'm sure he would have.
Since they are claiming Trade Secret status on the System V code, isn't failure to perform even basic attempts (such as contacting Linus) to minimise the impact of this leak enough to void the Trade Secret status of their code?
The more SCO speaks, the less credible this lawsuit sounds.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
...or do the stock quotes at the bottom of the article provide the best commentary on this issue?
I'm sure there are hundreds of others who've had their code "liberated" without their consent.
Are you saying you've liberated someone else's code for an open source project? I know I have not, and I've not seen any evidence of this having been done in the Linux kernel.
Where's the evidence?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
So they can slam OSS, but what about going the other way? I've heard of software stealing GPL code in part and in whole, making modifications, and not releasing the source again. Some have been caught, I'm willing to bet a whole lot more haven't been.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I love this quote:
> "The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go."
So you don't want us to fix this so-called infringement? Most companies do a cease-and-decist before a lawsuit, allowing the accused to make changes. If this infringment HAS cost them a billion in damages, wouldn't you think they would want the infringement to stop right away? They could still make their case in court and use the same so-called evidence to show that previous infringment caused the damage, but not allowing the accused to fix the problem just shows that it's not the infringement they care about. It's just a means to getting money.
This story has been posted about probably a dozen times now without any evidence included. Do you suppose you could hold off on posting new stories until either the evidence is made available or the suit is dismissed/won/settled? As it is now we're just seeing the same responses posted over and over again.
Thy HAVE to disclose it prior to trial. They will have to give it to IBM. IBM can then find the author and determine the truth.
Moderators on crack again (when it was marked as 'insightful,' iirc)
It is completely legal to write your own software. It's completely legal to use the same metaphors when solving the same problems. It's even legal to "clone" an interface when such interoperatibility is a high user requirement. Can you imagine the chaos if every vendor had to come up with new names and flags for programs like ls(1), cc(1), find(1), etc.
What's illegal is copying code without permission. That's not cloning, and the results can't be copylefted since the punitive author doesn't have the right to release the code.
And as for the idea that all OS implementations are just ripped off from commercial products, have you actually looked at the quality of commercial code lately? Haven't you heard of company after company after company switching to Linux and open tools after realizing that they were regularly spending 20% or so of their time fixing files corrupted when the app or system crashed, cleaning up after viruses, cleaning up the mess left by bundled malware, etc.? Even if some mad Microsoft employee sneaked out with the source for Word or Outlook and ported it to Linux, a lot of us would still keep far away from it because of the profound flaws in the applications.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
What SCO clearly do not understand and what the judge hopefully will, is that there are many common algorithms that when implemented, may have identical code. For example, if you were to have 100 coders, all with similar education, and told them to impliment Bubble Sort, I'd bet you'd venture afterwards that 70-80 of them plagerized somebody's code. While I cannot begin to speculate what kind of algorithms were implimented in code SCO claims was stolen, there's a very strong chance the similarities are coinincidence.
A situation like this arose in a couple assignments in computer science courses I've taken. This one professor I had, who was super anal and also did not understand this principle, accused myself and some of my peers of copying each others' code. His evidence for our "cheating" was that our programs all had some almost identical code save for variable names and some functions. Now, the kids I was accused of helping to cheat or cheating off of were people I had never before interacted with until we found ourselves in the prof's office. However, the professor had done the usual thing of teaching basics, here's some algorithms, here's how you do this, here's how you do that... and because some algorithms are so intuitively implimented, the product can look the same. I mean cripes, how do you expect every student to do mutexes or handle deadlock in completely unique ways? Some things have one correct way or being done!
We explained this to him numerous times, but it seemed with every assignment, different segments of the class were being accused of cheating. Unfortunately for some, they were not able to properly explain this phenomenon.
Either SCO is really dumb or they fully expect the judge to not understand it either.
Join Tor today!
SCO released a linux distribution.
At least the kernel was released under the GPL.
I would like to see how they explain that IBM GPL release of code is much more damaging then their own release, under the GPL, of that same code.
The fact that SCO has licenced others to redistribute this code under the GPL should make it pretty hard to get damages for others doing the same.
I know I'll get modded down for this, but the hot link in this story and the previous story on the subject are identical except for a positioning flag... I'm surprised nobody else has noticed.
...even they are openly distributing their own IP through Linux under the GPL, what right do (sp.) they have to sue other companies for doing the same!?
None.
They don't even have the right to sue other companies for distributing SCO's own IP if they put it in. Releasing anything under the GPL (assuming you have the legal right to do so), is ensuring that it will be distributed.
I personally believe that SCO will being to adopt the concept that actual code may not have moved over, but concepts that they believe fall under their IP rights. SysV stuff especially. Chunks of kernel code could resemble SCO's code at least in style and possibly perfectly in some places because they are both implementations of SysV concepts. As long as SCO doesn't have pages of copy-pasted code to show us, they'll have a very hard time disproving the idea that kernel developers have similar code because they mimick SysV.
Another thing I don't think anyone has brought up... how can SCO prove that the code they produce in court to compare to Linux's is actually UnixWare code? They're talking about laundering Linux code, it would be much easier for them to toss chunks of code in to UnixWare, or not even actually put them in at all, and just pretend it was theirs all along.
I think the big debate isn't over copied code, but whether or not implementing SysV without code-piracy is under SCO's IP rights.
Food for thought...
The reason that SCO is pursuing this case in the first place is that they are doomed. They rely primarily on proprietary UNIX licenses (OpenServer and Unixware) for x86 hardware to survive and anyone with half a brain is making the easy migration from SCO UNIX to Linux. In the meantime SCO has to maintain not one but two proprietary UNIXes with a development team smaller than RedHat's, and they haven't even got a version of their software that runs on Itanium or Opteron processors. Not to mention the fact that they are already losing money with no relief in sight.
In short, SCO is screwed.
However, they realized that they could alleviate some of the hurting in the short run by running a FUD campaign against Linux. If they scare enough of their current customers into thinking that Linux has intellectual property problems then they might retain some key accounts for another round of upgrades. Some investors might even believe that they have a chance of making real money with their lawsuit, and this would give SCO managers a chance to cash in some of their SCO stock while it is still worth more than the paper it is printed on. That is what this circus is all about. SCO knows they aren't going to win. Heck, they aren't even *trying* to win. The whole thing is nothing more than an elaborate con job.
RedHat and friends could countersue for damages based on their ridiculous claims, but this isn't likely to make them any money. After all, if SCO had money they wouldn't be trying this stupid stunt in the first place.
These guys (SCO) sound like they hired the old Information Minister from Iraq
It sounds a bit more like the statements from the US government.
1: Claim you have proof of IP theft
2: Refuse to show proof
3: Sue
4: ??buyout offer??
5: Pretend IP theft was a non-issue all along.
Hundreds of people have slipped in copyrighted code to the Linux kernel. The whole thing is copyrighted. But anyway ...
I have on several occasions seen junior programmers at proprietary software companies take code off the net or out of a textbook, and try to build it into a proprietary product (e.g. they need to do an FFT, so they get one out of "Numerical Algorithms in C"). This is because they have no clue about the difference between "the source code is published" and "it's public domain". Such codes get ripped out when found, or licenses are negotiated when it's too hard (at least at ethical companies),but it does happen.
The point is, it does happen that proprietary code contains illegally copied software, so SCO had better be careful what they allege.
Or, maybe it's something like:
! Save all registers.
push eax
push ebx
push ecx
push edx
jmp somewhere
"Hey, wow, we have that in our code too! And it's not just a minor copying, because they used the same comment!"
C and assembler have a much smaller vocab (orders of magnitude) than English, and accidental things like this go on in English all the time.
Also, they're comparing two unix-based kernels.. don't you think similar code would show up? After all, both are derived (either directly (SCO) or indirectly (Linux)) from the same original operating system (duh!).
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
When SCO (nee Caldera) distributed Linux under the GPL, there was an SCO authorized distribution of the previously stolen code under the GPL.
At the very least, this indemnifies *everyone* past the first rogue, and arguably makes it impossible for SCO to call the code back.