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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.
When are these clowns going to figure out what their story is? Coming out of a back room filing cabinet with an amendment that Novell doesn't even have on file sounds like a pretty bizarre circumstance. If this is the piece of evidence upon which their claim stands, then why didn't they roll this out in the first place?
I can't recall a company performing such exquisite hara-kiri in public view before...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Not having the benefit of seeing the code I'll have to assumme these comments are fairly overwhelming evidence wise.
If you knowingly copy code, into a product that can be viewed by potentially millions, wouldn't you at least try to make it not resemble the original work.
Yes, it is easy to catch the lazy cheaters, but if put some effort in it then it should be a little more difficult then running grep.
I'm sure there are bound to be similarities here and there, coders no doubt ran into the same problems working on the same platform, but apparently these grievances were enough to goto court over.
Obviously, we can surmise they understand their work enough to copy kernel code, so we know the individuals were at least someone intelligent.
So, having in mind how code theft works, it doesn't make sense for something as obvious as a comment to stick around unless someone wanted to get caught.
Just my 1/100th of the american dollar.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
This would give them a case against IBM, but that still doesn't cover the fact that SCO had an agreement with Lindows to use code. I don't think they have commented on the Lindows issue.
:p
Anyways, I think we have been over this 100 times now.
Every Super Villan uses Linux.
Giga information group rings a bell with me too, old MS yay and Apple/Linux/everything else nay sayers :)
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http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:lGZmsKmjdowJ: www.yankeegroup.com/public/events/conferences/ITF2 003/components/IntegrationTechForumSpeakers.pdf+La ura+DiDio&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
If SCO had this amendment (which Novell apparently doesn't atm) then WHY WERE THEY ASKING NOVELL FOR COPYRIGHT RECENTLY?
Novel and SCO both seem to have forgoten about it, and/or something screwy is going on.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What if SCO took some code from Linux and inserted into its own code? Even if there are some similarities between SCO's code and Linux's code how can SCO prove that it was stolen from SCO and not vice versa?
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
That there was no followup makes it easier for me to believe anyone who claims this document is a fabrication.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Comments are often a good way to tell lifted code.
Things like two spaces between certain words, mispelings, Weird Capitilization, etc.
Those are the kinds of things that are most damning.
In college, my roommate and I worked on a project for a programming class together. It was three parts, the last part was the largest part of your grade. We worked together for the first two parts, but I did all the work. He literally didn't write one line of code. I think he might have tried to write some header or something, that I wound up heavily changing anyway.
Anyway, so I told the professor about it, and asked that we work seperately on the final part. I got the project nearly completed, and I could tell from his testing that he wasn't getting nearly anywhere. Then near the time to turn in the project, suddenly his version had nearly all the features mine had.
I told the professor right away, and it almost went to honor court, but the professor didn't want to press it, he said it would mostly be his word against mine, etc..
Anyway, the bottom line is, the most compelling evidence of code theft was mispellings and other things of that sort in comments and variable names.
Having the exact same esoteric bugs is also pretty compelling.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If there is an exact copy of some comment from Sys V and Linux can't we build a database of comments in Sys V (someones got to have the code) and a database of comments in Linux and check simularities?
Couldn't this be done with a few simple grep or sed commands?
Sure there would be alot of trivial differences, but if SCO is right and there is a complex alogrithm inside Linux copied for SysV then the comments for that code should be fairly obvious.
Maybe I'm a bit late to the show, but I noticed MIMEDefang version 2.34-BETA-5 includes a new "--enable-running-on-scummy-sco" option.
:)
I wonder how many SCO admins will actually use this option.
How much jail time did whoever edited the phony videotape evidence in the Microsoft trial serve?
-- Alastair