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No Business Like SCO Business
The SCO must go on. Informationweek has a roundup. News.com has some analysis of the legal case. SCO reiterates their threat to revoke IBM's license. Reader hobsonchoice sends a blurb: "Also more from analysts who saw SCO/Linux code comparisons under NDA. Bill Claybrook, of Aberdeen Group Inc., says SCO changed their story to him about whether they had any "direct evidence" that IBM copied any System V code into Linux.
Laura Didio of Yankee Group has answered some detailed questions about her code review process. Lastly Fujitsu Siemens have joined in the debate: they don't think SCO's case is going anywhere." One observer of the SCO case has compiled some notes about Caldera's active participation in the IA-64 project. And look on the bright side: if you follow the school of thought that all publicity is good publicity, at least this suit has gotten Linux mentioned in many places where it normally wouldn't be.
Perhaps your new to Slashdot and don't know about many of the exciting features we have to offer you!
Like the lameness filter for commenting, Anonymouse posting for when you're violating your NDA, or TURNING OFF PARTICULAR SUBJECTS.
You may have noticed these are all listed under Caldera.
You may be sick and tired of it, but I for one am curious to see how this works out in the end. Sure it's a bit over dramatized, but it relates to me.
Computational Madness in a round package.
ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Serv er/current/
They seem to have their whole distro available.
Even the developpers of the IBM journalled filesytem (JFS) don't have access at all to the AIX version of the same filesystem. So, I think SCO is just shooting itself in the foot.
In fact, they just try to delay customers' acceptance of Linux and try to find someone to pay for there lack of business intelligence.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Today I had the opportunity to look at the [incriminating?] code snippets.
Through a mistake of the representing Law firm, my colleague and I did not have to sign an NDA, unlike the other 7 representatives that also were viewing the code today. This is in stark contrast to the Microsoft representatives who apparently even had to maintain silence with their own supervisors, and were only allowed to report back to their internal [Legal?] department.
Now to the code itself:
46 pages each containing one half Linux code (largely printed posts out of the linux-kernel lists) and one half listings from SCO were presented under legal supervision. It is therefore not possible to tell whether this actually comes from SysV-Sources, as they are taken out of context. Also interisting is that all dates are taken out of both parts, even out of the comments.
The comments are in fact identical in places. Even some of the jokes are the same on both sides. What is apparent, though, is that in the most similar places the preceding source code is quite different. The basic structure of the affected functions are similar, but the concrete implementation is quite different. Variables and function names are different, loops are structured differently, conditions run on chained conditionals or bitmaps. All in all only one thing is sure: the functions presented in the code-snippets were often the same, which was to be expected, though.
In the concrete implementation there are so many differences, however, that a proof of the same origin will be hard to construct, albeit not impossible.
However one function of the scheduler presents a [breaking point?], as except for minor differences it is identical. In this case there are also a whole row of matching comments.
Only one routine of the Memory Management offers comparable similarity. In this case, however, only the linux version has comments.
Only a lawyer could safely judge whether these two similarities alone provide proof enough for a verdict. The vague similarties in other parts are, in my opinion, insufficient, since a certain similarity is to be expected as both pieces are based on the same standards. On the other hand, I have no clue where the identical comments in different code could come from. In any case, this should be researched more closely, especially with the dates restored. Only with these would a copyright infringement be provable.
As to the discussion of the piece of Linux sold by SCO/Caldera itself under the GPL, one has to take into account that no Court has commented on the enforcability of the GPL yet...
[Sorry ran out of time. I will try to get to the rest later. Perhaps someone else can translate the rest.]
Here you will find the pdf of the Linux Kernel Internals, authored by Tigran Aivazian (tigran@veritas.com). Now, he has been submitting patches to the kernel for a long time.
He submitted patches for (among others)
Microcode updates
...)
iBCS patches
kgdb patches
Linux Implementation of SCO UnixWare BFS
and I'm sure a lot more, across a wide range of kernel versions (2.2/2.3/2.4
Why does this matter? Well his email used to be tigran@ocston.org. odd domain name, try reversing it.search and look at the first two results, then look here for more info about the first entry.
Before that his email was tigran@sco.org, but he
got a little paranoid
about it.
Searching google brings up patches supplied by him throughout the whole development cycle of 2.3/2.4 and more. He is directly connected to the author of the LKP on SCO Unix, draw your own conclusions here.