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SCO has discovered an amendment to their contract with Novell that may clarify that they did purchase the copyright to System V after all. Heise has an interview in German with a former employee. Cringely says SCO probably was responsible for any duplicated code itself, with a theory that is quite plausible. One non-programmer corporate analyst has looked at SCO's alleged evidence. And SCO has another press conference today.
From the article:
So Novell agrees that the information in this ammendment appears to be legit, but they can't verify that this ammendment actually occurred because they don't have a copy of it themselves?
Could it be that SCO happened to "create" this ammendment and then convienently "find it in a filing cabinet" ?
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
Not having the benefit of seeing the code I'll have to assumme these comments are fairly overwhelming evidence wise.
/* Beware all ye who enter here */? What if both System V and Linux stole the code from BSD? Was a SCO lacky sitting over the analyst's shoulder pointing out the high points? What if the "analyst" was a SCO plant from the beginning?
Thats a poor assumption. Whow knows what the context of the code is? Could this "non programmer analyst" determine if the code was really similar? What if the System V code came from the IDE subsystem, and the Linux code came from the networking subsystem? What if the comment was
There are just too many questions and not enough answers. I want to see the professional opinion of a kernel expert, and *then* I want to review it myself before I will start to agree that SCO might have a case. Until then, we have no idea what deals have gone on behind the scenes. There is just way too much money in play here for us not to be cynical.
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I should be able to patent the methods I used to achieve that, as well.
IF (and ONLY if) you (and for this discussion, "you" is any developer, not avalys in particular) actually innovated to do so. Changing from one well-known algorithm or data structure to another well-known one with better average or worst-case performance IS NOT INNOVATION. It's what you (hopefully) learned to do in school.
Yes, if you really, TRULY, come up with some new algorithm that no-one thought of before, yes, you should be *allowed* to patent it.
But there are two very good reasons why you should think long and hard before you do:
1) Chances are, you *didn't* invent it -- you probably just independently arrived at a solution that HAS been done before. So, there's a considerable risk that it's *already* been patented somewhere else (e.g. IBM or Microsoft), or that there's prior art that's clearly NOT patent-encumbered.
2) More importantly to software engineering as a field of practice, a great many true innovators make it a point NOT to protect their innovation, but instead to share it with their collegues, with students, with anyone who's interested.
Yes, that may be bad for business for the short term, but as a field that's still very research oriented, it's better for everyone in the long term.
Imagine where we'd be today if Dijkstra (holy crap, I spelled that right on the first try?) had patented his shortest-path algorithm? If various process-scheduling algorithms were patented, instead of published in textbooks?
If you only care about the here and now and your back pocket, sure, patent a method -- if you can truly convince yourself that you've innovated, and were the FIRST to do so.
But if you're interested in furthering the field, or if you know full well that what you did is neat but not truly new, *innovative*, and *non-obvious* (even after the fact), consider sharing, and letting others build on your work, instead.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
I haven't posted yet about this story because I couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted to say. I just knew that it made me sick every time I saw SCO vs. Linux or any time I thought about the lawsuit(s) involved.
I think it's a deeper, more disturbed form of the same sensation that I get when we discuss intellectual property laws on Slashdot.
What it all comes down to is this: I don't care if there are six or ten minor chunks of SCO code in Linux. I don't care where the Linux code came from. SCO is not good for humanity; SCO is a product. Linux, on the other hand, is good for humanity on a fundamental level.
It brings computing services to people across the world who otherwise couldn't afford it or who otherwise would be sending money to multi-billionaire Bill Gates instead of buying food. Thanks to Linux, these people can spend their money on real things that they need, while still participating in the global exchange of ideas and perhaps getting a toe-hold in the "modern" western world that.
Linux provides nonprofits like churches and community centers the ability to provide 'net access and document services to underpriveleged communities who otherwise wouldn't have access to these things or would have to depend on meager government funding to buy licenses (again while lining the pockets of the rich).
Linux provides some of the best hands-on education to young aspiring programmers and scientists that can be found anywhere, and it does so using best-of-breed tools, and at no charge.
Linux has fostered a community of international understanding between research organizations, governments, communities and even small groups of programmers and individuals. There are no borders in Linux, only individuals working together, smiling and one another and breaking barrier after barrier together.
Some look at this list and say "hmm... makes national borders irrelevent... helps the poor and not the rich... does not pay for labor in currency, but in the rewards of the product itself... is not strongly managed from the top down by anyone with fiscal authority, but is instead contributed to by a vast egalitarian labor pool..." and then they call Linux a form of communism and say that it needs to be eliminated, or at least that it is unethical to support Linux instead of for-profit companies.
Are these people insane? Linux is a boon to humanity. Anyone who can't see that is blind. If Linux is communism, it's time to take another look at communism, because it looks to me like a beautiful thing.
And in the meantime, I don't care where the code of Linux comes from. The fact is, SCO's never done thing one to help the human race, here they are busily exploiting it, rich and poor, young and old a like, just like so many other companies out there greedily trying to harm all our lives on the basis of "IP", and now they seem to think they can kill Linux off in the interest of making a buck, and that this would be a good, "moral" thing... and many mainstream analysts seem to make the basic assumption that if Linux did "steal" SCO's code, then this is indeed the case. Well, I disagree. Linux helps people at no charge. SCO makes a profit by exploiting people.
It's just wrong. It's backward. It makes me sick. I don't care where Linux's code comes from. SCO is no Linux and never will be, and if we end up with a nice, profitable SCO and a damaged (or defunct) Linux movement, I think the world will be a much worse place, not a much better one, no matter how much people harp about the "right" thing to do or the "rights" of copyright holders.
I almost feel like some kind of neo-flower-child. Screw the establishment. Help the people. If that's communism or if that's bad for business, so fscking what?
It's not wise to get in a bind over the comments of one analyst. Remember, analysts of this same sort said .com's would continue their rise. It may very well be in this analyst's interest to assert similarities in commenting style. Interestingly enough, there was no talk in the article about actual code being reproduced, only comments.
SCO's claim was that source code had been cut directly from "their" Unix code and added to Linux. This does not preclude someone from working on both projects. All this analyst's statements show is that the same people may have worked on both systems. This doesn't show a wholesale heist of intellectual property.
SCO may be taking a page from the M$ playbook by intentially pushing "evidence from experts" to the public. Will this analysts comments be mailed to Linux users? It wouldn't surprise me in the least. If SCO can drive FUD to the hearts of corporate types, they can all but force an IBM buyout.
So far Novell has played their cards right. They have documentation to back up every claim they've made, and they haven't given me one reason to doubt them. The fact that SCO has a document that no one else does, and the fact that they just suddenly discovered it makes me point fingers at SCO before pointing at Novell.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
This is great stuff for tech geeks, but publications that your boss is reading such as this article over as business week are what your boss(you know, the guy who pays your salary) are reading. I would say this whole debacle is having quite the intended effect.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
My thought on all this is that that won't be known until such time as the code in question is actually released. At which point the Linux kernel admins will look at their records, hunt down the people who submitted those patches, and *ask them*, and probably call them as witnesses.
At this point things will probably get interesting, as there are open, public records that show bit by bit in pretty close detail every step of the development of the linux kernel, and who submitted what, and when, and why it was accepted-- and these records have been publicly available on the internet for years, and archives exist in various places, which would make these records impossible to change after the fact. SCO, meanwhile, if they have records at all of when and by who code was added to their materials, has no particular proof that those records are real and not faked (either by their lawyers or a malicious employee years previous trying to pass off open source code as his own work). Just a thought..
Of course had SCO simply begun all this by publicly saying "hey, these parts of the linux kernel are copied from code we own the copyright to", the linux kernel admins would have just about certainly simply checked out those sections of code and the people who wrote them, and, if there was an apparent infringement, removed and replaced the offending sections. I'm really really hoping that this fact will not escape the judge at trial.
(I'm assuming the linux kernel people wouldn't do something stupid like allow an anonymous patch into the kernel.)
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