SCO Berates Linus' Approach To Kernel Contributions

Matthias_305 writes "The New York Times has an article about a new court document in which SCO critizes Linus Torvalds touting the 'inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code.' They claim to have got evidence from a conversation on the kernel mailing list in which Torvalds advocates programmers shouldn't care about patents. According to the article he stands by his view which is at least 'candid'." On a related note, BobDowling points to a proposal at The Inquirer ("Shutting down SCO's FUD machine") regarding SCO's claims. "SCO won't let people see the contested source code without signing an outrageous NDA but the article gives a mechanism for publishing appropriate MD5 checksums which allow code trees to be compared without anyone else seeing the code. This is offered as a means to locate the source of SCO's contested code. ... This mechanism gives a concrete procedure that SCO can be challenged to follow as part of the community's "put up or shut up" response. There would be no threat to SCO's claimed IPR."

Comments

Re:Will someone berate SCO' spproach here??

[EnglishTim]

Finally, I mentioned to the board that the Linux Kernel development team has the greatest amount of programmer talent on the planet... Greater than Microsoft,SCO,SUN,Apple,IBM and Silicon Graphics combined.

Do you always lie to your board?

Sure, there's a lot of very talented people working on the Linux kernel, but do you really think there's more than they have at Microsoft, Sun, or IBM? I find that idea *exceptionally* unlikely. Combined they've got many thousands of programmers working for them. How many people actually make any sizable contribution to the Linux kernel? A couple of hundred at most, I'd have thought.

Who's the real villian?

[geekee]

Funny how Linus shows complete disregard for patents and IBM steals code from SCO, and somehow SCO is the villian. I think it's pretty clear who's in the wrong here. If MS was suing MS over the same issues, they'd be heroes here. Stop being such biased hypocrites and stop making judgements based on who's being accused, rather than the issues at stake.