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My Visit to SCO
Ian Lance Taylor writes "I signed the SCO NDA and visited them to discuss their claims against Linux. My essay about it is on the Linux Journal web site. The short version is that SCO's claims are unproven, as indeed I expected would be the case before I went. The amount of information they were willing to show me was extremely limited, and
did not by itself prove that their claims were true, nor that their claims were false." Other SCO-bits: Sun is doing their usual foot-in-mouth routine, thinking that two FUDs makes a Solaris purchase, or something like that. IBM is now joining the contact the customers bandwagon. Eric Raymond has been keeping himself busy - here's a story about him. SCO hates BSD, too, but they're not taking it lying down. And of course Cringley has his two cents.
It's a complete rip of another users post, and sorry to him for trying to whore him out of this post, but:
Thank goodness! I was worried I'd go a day without finding out more about SCO.
I am currently R(ing)TFA, and I gotta say... There's not much to go on. It makes one think that SCO might not have a case.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
Companies are strong enough to lobby for (and get) extentions to copyright laws, mandates for manufacturers to implement digital restrictions; invasive EULA terms allowing search, seizure, and destruction without probable cause; EULA terms circumventing the right to free speech by disallowing the dissemination of performance statistics; laws propping up otherwise unsustainable "give away the razor, sell the blades at a premium" marketing schemes; and tariffs (ahem, music industry subsidies) on blank media. We are seeing an era where supposedly capitalist countries are turning into command economies owned by the media and software industries. The new laws these companies purchase essentially bind the "invisible hand" that's *supposed* to control the economy and pervert what's left of capitalism. When you buy RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft products, you are buying into corporate communism. As you pay for overpriced products, expect more of the same abuses in the future as you are funding for the very lobbying and DRM development that is undermining a true capitalistic economy. Ironically, socialist operating systems such as Linux and BSD are one way to avoid a Soviet future. Or more likely, stave it off for a period of time. Please realize that Linux is socialist software and is not related to Soviet communism in any way. Donating code to GPLed projects is no more communist-like than donating spare change to the Salvation Army.
(Interestingly, the GNU GPL is designed to prevent Soviet-style corporate communism by requiring authors and distributors to cede the rights granted by law that allow them to take away rights from those who receive the software. However, I'm not going to analyze the license any further. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.)
How are artists supposed to compete in a capitalistic society when a cartel controls the airwaves, receives media subsidies, signs exclusive contracts for shelf space, and owns the means of distribution? Why must artists cede their copyrights to a cartel in order to make a living? How is that any different from the former Soviet Union where artists must give the rights of their works to the government in order to live? I see little difference between the two-- in one case a trust owns the rights, in the other it is the government. In this day and age there is little difference between corporations and government-- the two are married to each other to the extent that for all practical purposes they are the same entity.
Fortunately, there is one medium that the music industry hasn't successfully controlled.. at least not yet. That is the Internet. It is the only means by which independent artists have a chance to distribute, advertise, and sell their works worldwide. The Internet is already on the RIAA's hit list.
Now let's go back to the discussion of communism. Mind you, I'm not talking about unattainable Marxist idealism, but the form of communism that actually developed in Soviet Russia-- the command economy. During the Red Scare, many innocent people were accused of working for Soviet interests and persecuted because of those accusations. The Red Scare was rather rash and foolish in hindsight because it turned out that the accusations were baseless. However, I can tell you one thing for certain. The RIAA is a communist organization. Its members are true red Soviet Russia comrade wannabes in the clothes of capitalists. The truth is that the RIAA is not interested in playing by the laws that have served the country for centuries. The RIAA wants to control the technology you own. In a way the RIAA wants to own the functionality of your hardware and then lease you a few features as the media industry pleases. At the whim of the industry, corporations may retract features in future products and force product firmware updates, much like a communist government taking back a bicycle it loaned to you because the bike isn't yours to own. The RIAA seeks to micromanage the rights to its works to an extent that requires perve
I really wish that IBM would just buy these whiney babies out and open source Unix. Well, first IBM collects some payments from Microsoft for the "Unix license" that they "bought" from SCO, and then IBM makes it open source.
In a discussion I was reading that mentioned this article, it was mentioned that there was a misspelled word in the comments of some allegedly copied code. If true, then one could just strip the comments from the Linux source, and do a spell check in the appropriate language. I forgot where I was this. Can somebody verify?
:)
Or better yet, Ian Taylor can just tell us the name of the file.
I've wondered this ever since SCO started saying they'd let people look at the code under an NDA. Perhaps you can give us some light as to what the NDA swore you to?
NDAs are held to be invalid if the information that you agree not to disclose is already public information, or is revealed to the general public through someone elses doing at a later time.
If the claim is that certain lines of code belonging to SCO are now being distributed in the public domain then it would seem that you couldn't NDA that away - the cat's already out of the bag so to speak. Assuming their claims are 100% valid, everyone who signed the NDAs is perfectly free to tell you exactly what lines of code are infringing, yet nobody has done this. Suppose because they can't find anything that's conclusively out in the open already (the basis of SCO's claims)
Theoretically, under this model, the descendents of Johann Gutenberg now get to sue every book publisher in the world for not paying them royalties on the IP of printable-format books. Wow. Time to hit the family tree records!
IAALS.
Two things stuck out for me, after reading.
The biggie: SCO basically is arguing that any code developed on top of Unix is a derivative work of Unix.
If you developed on Unix, and then went to Linux and did something similiar a few years down the line, with the benefit of hindsight yet with the same goals in mind, you probably did one of two things: recoded the section from memory, or, recoded a part of it using what you remembered plus possibly a better method that you had learned through sheer experience. SCO wants to claim rights to that experience. So no matter where you go from this day forward, if you happen to code the same thing in a *nix-like operating system, and they see the same algorithm (because, for example, the one you came up with couldn't be improved on), they should get a chunk of that.
Next: SCO said it has no current program [for Linux Licensing]. It hopes to come up with something in which noncommercial use and educational use would be free, but for commercial use it wants some remuneration. SCO said it hadn't come up with a plan because it still is trying to figure out the scale of the problem.
Did anyone else cringe as soon as they read the term "Linux Licensing", which preceded that paragraph?
"the scale of the problem" is an easy way of saying "finding every corporate customer on Redhat, Lindows, SUSE, and every other distro's books and sending them OUR Linux Licensing agreement."
This is so painful to watch. The company wants to say that anyone with a good idea cannot port that idea years later. That they own it. That even if that programmer kept a chunk of the code they once wrote, because they knew they couldn't remember it line-per-line, and copied it into a kernel module, that they own the rights to it.
More or less, if you've ever worked for Company A, coded something for them, found a very unique and exceptional way of, say, saving a compressed binary file, and you save that chunk of code for later use, and use it in free, GPL'd, software, then Company A has the right to sue you for violating their Intellectual Property. That, to me, is wrong. Even if the comments are the same. Even if the algorithm is the same.
Welcome to the grey area of black and white operating systems. What a terrible place to be.
Seeking to invalidate SCO's claims, ESR managed to round up 60 users who had access to SysV code. Is it going to be enough? BSD could claim that thousands of users had access to that code. If what ESR claims is true (SCO licencinc SysV to universities) than the whole case looks more and more like BSD (+Univ. of California) vs. USL case. Read IT
Do a few bad apples spoil the bunch?
Assume for a second that some copyrighted Unix source code is in Linux (I find this plausable). Also assume that copyright protection is necessary for lots of innovation (I also find this plausable, and most economists agree). And, anyway, assume that we are society based on laws, and those laws must be enforced for the greater good.
Is Linux now "tainted"? What happens if they find and remove all the offending code, is that good enough? What if a steal a car and then return it, does it negate the crime? I am in the software industry, and I can tell you, if someone steals software, simply removing it later does not end their libility.
On the other hand, just because a few wanna-bee coders couldn't figure out how to write something themselves and copied it from somewhere else, should we declare the work of the vast majority of Linux contributers to be tainted? (I am assuming that the vast majority of Linux code is an original work, which I believe it is, but, of course, who knows until it all comes out). It would seem unfare to allow the bad actions of a few to kill the work of hundreds, but it also seems unfair to let theft go unpunished.
I don't know the answer. This seems like one of those ethical situations where both sides are right (except the third side, the theives, but I think most agree they are in the wrong). This will all probably come down to some legal technicality or out-of-court settlement, but I think the ethical question is interesting.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
Great point. Also, weren't they GIVING their ancient linux away until very recently? It's hard to give something away then claim trade secret. Although I'm not sure that covers all their claims, as they tend to jump around a lot.
Similarly, I would bring up the old "If linux copied SMP from you, how come they're so much better at it?" routine. OpenLinux flat sucks, and that's all there is to it.
It's also fun to hear them interpret the GPL. They seem to think that, since IBM put their code into the GPL, that this prevents their code from actually BEING GPL'd...even if THEY release linux too! Something must be in the water in Utah.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I was under the distinct impression that IBM was phasing out AIX in favor of Linux over the next decade, which is one of the big reasons SCO was angry. I could be wrong.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I can't help thinking that as of this writing SCO has a market cap of around $130 million and Red Hat has nearly $300 million in cash and investments. Even at an inflated price, Red Hat could afford to buy SCO and free up Unix once and for all. Live the dream.
And IBM could afford to do it and might even still have enough money to buy a G8 country. OK, that's an exaggeration, but if Red Hat could afford it, IBM certainly could. Apple could. And Microsoft could.
And this leads one to ask: why haven't they? If MS really thought SCO had a smoking gun to put straight through Linux's heart, don't you think they'd do it in a second? They're willing to dump millions on software licensing and lobbying not to lose to Linux in the public sector and large coroporate installations. A cool $130 Million that could knock Linux development flat for 5-10 years would be an easy investment for them.
But they don't do it. Very curious. So how compelling is that case again?
Tweet, tweet.
You ought to take a look at what AIX actually costs. The last two RS/6000s I bought each came with an unlimited user license for AIX 5L that was listed as a line-item of each invoice as $270.
Hell, the annual maintenance I pay for AIX costs more than the purchase price!!!!
"[SCO] said that until the parties go to court, it doesn't want the Linux community to remove the code in question. SCO thinks it's more than changing a few lines of code."
I'd bet a all the money I have that if that "offending" code was revealed tonight we'd have it all rewritten by Monday morning. The Linux community is more angry about this than anything that has ever touched it. All that anger would be unleached in an orgy of coding the likes of which even God has not seen.
SCO is afraid the reason for thier lawsuit will vanish is they reveal their hand.
"[SCO] feels large chunks are derivative. It argued that even a full replacement would be in part based on the prior effort, and thus would itself be derivative, at least under the terms of the IBM contract."
Sorry. no. It'd be easy to get around this. You tell me what code infriges and I'll post the input and expected output from that code (without even revealing where the code is). Any programmer who independently writes code that meets those requirements has NOT infringed SCO's licences.
I've posted a message to Sun user group (usenet). Told what I think: what Sun was simply mean-spirited, not just 'opportunistic', and if this is the only business plan Sun has, I feel sorry for them.
The fact is that SCO is a mad dog biting everyone in site. What Sun is doing -- saying 'See, this dog hasn't bitten me yet! Good doggy!'.
Reaction on my posting was rather hilarious. Seems like all the responses came from Sun sockpuppets. The most intelligent response was 'Linux is for script kiddies'. In fact I even didn't mention LInux in my posting.
Funny, I have solid Sun experience, starting from Sun/OS 4.1.3 when it was BSD-based, before they move to Solaris 2.x (System V based), and I considered and still consider their product rather solid (Sun/OS 4.1.3 and 4.1.4, and SOlaris 2.5+), but frankly, I believe they've just lost the sense of directions, and unfortunately, taking advantage of current situation *is* the only business plan they apparently have. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Same thing here, SCO is taking a very loose and general definition of derivative works. I doubt that any version of AIX is much of a derivative of SysV, then to go above and beyond that and try to call deriviatives of AIX technology SysV derivatives is legally interesting. This is a company that has never shipped anything remotely close to the technologies they are calling derivative. I think the courts will rule as expected in this case and the matter will be clear. I could understand if SCO was shipping something kind of Solaris like and IBM was taking AIX code derived from that solaris like platform and adding it to Linux. At best SCO owns something not that much more advanced than the OS project I did in college; in all seriousness it's closer to Yalnix and NachOS than it is to AIX. There probably isn't even a common data structure in it anymore.
Let's take this a little further. NT/2000/XP has BSD code and SysV code in it, both in the networking stack and in the POSIX layer. It has been radically altered and shares very little in common with the initial code but those were the starting points. Does that mean IE and DirectX and derivative works that SCO could in turn prevent MS from doing something like porting to MacOSX which is a product that competes with UNIX.
You're absolutely right! And, by comparison in the Personal Computer world, how many copies of Windows does Microsoft sell now "off the shelf" vs. the amount they sell to PC Manufacturers who bundle it to their computers? A (relatively to the total amount) insignificant amount!
Apple is also in a very similar boat (more so to IBM or SUN) where most of their OS sales (though they probably sell more OSX "off the shelf" than Microsoft does) come bundled with their hardware.
I really don't think many, if any commercial OS's do the majority of their sales in retail. This brings up an interesting point. If Linux never really gains ground as something bundled (ala Windows or MacOS) on PC's from the manufacturer, they may be the one exception to this!
Linux can do this (and has been doing this (though in the overall figures of yearly PC OS sales, probably a negligibe proportion) for some time (those boxed up RedHat's, Mandrakes, etc.)).
Of course, back when it was mostly geeks using computers at home, software purchases for things like OS's were undoubtedly much higher than they are now. Now that the majority (numerically, not intellectually) of PC users are non-geeks (who generally can't grasp why you'd want to upgrade your OS!) most of the purchases are for games and other *ware.
It seems to me, expanding what you said, that no one makes money selling OS's **directly** to people anymore. Combined with the fact that no one's gonna bundle SCO Unix with computers anymore (yes, Linux probably drove them out of business, combined with the crappiness of their product), SCO (Captain Obvious speaking now:) is just trying to sue (part of) what drove them out of business! Their main intellectual problem is that they don't see their own crappy product as having anything to do with it!
Maybe they should sue themselves too!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
Like many libertarians, ESR is probably torn between allowing individuals to homestead in the realm of ideas and the counter-view which states that any form of copyright is a restriction on the property rights one has in physical property. Or it could just be that he's not as careful or pedantic as others (RMS, for example). I should note that I stopped reading Lawrence Lessig's latest book when I got to a line that stated he considered copying an entire book "stealing".
To me the most interesting quote was from Ian's article regarding software patents: "The software industry today survives only through an unstated agreement not to stir things up too much." Pretty much what this says is that we are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike-- and that the darker it gets the more likely we are to be eaten by a grue.
Copyright/patent madness as it relates to the less cut and dried aspects of fields like software (and music and movies) has us spending more time "clearing rights" than writing software (or music or movies). The innovation that the temporary monopoly granted by a copyright or patent is supposed to foster is nowhere to be found, except in those areas where those copyrights and patents are least enforced. If there is truly an unstated agreement to let sleeping dogs lie in the software industry, the minute someone (like SCO?) sets off the alarm, those dogs will awaken and bite us all.
The obvious things needed are: an end to software patents, a stricter limit on copyrights (especially for works that are primarily non-fiction in nature-- news reporting, software, etc), and more Free Software.
I do not have a signature
Altogether, I'm not surprised at this action by Sun. What continually surprises me is that people view Sun as some kind of friend to open source software. The company is built on making open source software (Berkeley UNIX) proprietary, influential Sun employees like Gosling have a bad history with the open source movement, and Sun would like nothing more than to see Linux go away. One's enemy's enemy is not necessarily one's friend.
If the open source community isn't careful, what is happening with SCO and Linux now will happen with Sun and open source Java efforts in a few years. Sun will go down the drain, like SCO, they will get desparate, and they will almost certainly not disappear without lawsuits.
You've never worked with IBM apparently. They aren't immune to screw-ups. I've seen their screw ups 1st hand. It wouldn't surprise me if their legal dept. had no clue that AIX coders were writing Linux code, in the process borrowing AIX ideas. At IBM, there is a HUGE emphasis on creating IP, writing patents, and publishing papers. That doesn't necessarily mean they protect themselves against violating other people's IP.
Vote for Pedro
The Mormon Church has a prominent role in SCO's biggest investor, The Canopy Group. Canopy is currently running the day-to-day operations of SCO. CEO Darl McBride and ex-CEO Ransom Love are Mormon.
Add to this, the $10 million that Micro$oft put into SCO in the way of "licenses." Yeah, right. If you believe that, I have fresh water from Great Salt Lake to sell you. Micro$oft won't have to get too involved in this one, though. This suit has friends in the highest places, people even more powerful than Bill Gates himself.
The lawsuit is in Utah. Utah is a Mormon theocracy. The judge reportedly assigned to the case is a Mormon bishop who, by definition, takes his orders directly from Temple Square (aka the Mormon Vatican or the Mormon Kremlin).
SCO has also hired prominent Mormon lawyers like Sen. Orrin "Kill the pirate PCs" Hatch's son. They also hired Friend of Bill Clinton David Boies, whom I don't believe is Mormon - proof that bedfellows do make strange politics.
Mormons live their lives (both personally and politically) according to the dictates of church leaders. There is as much questioning of the leaders' decisions as there was in the former Soviet Union. The only difference between the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il is that the Mormons don't torture and kill people. But if LDS hierarchy wants SCO to win, they will win.
Because of this, bet on SCO to win at least the first round. IBM's success depends on how many Mormon lawyers they hire and how well-connected in the church they are. IBM has very powerful lawyers, but if they aren't Mormon, they have little chance in Utah.
The article on Linuxjournal has been about the clearest article on the whole debacle I've seen yet. It says a number of things to me:
1.It takes someone involved with OSS to finally paint a somewhat clear picture of what this whole issue is about.
2.SCO seems to have some knowledge from the Monterrey project that IBM developers that were working there later became involved in Linux. To me this is perhaps the only real case SCO has got. They would have known who was developing on the IBM side and by scanning the Linux kernel mailing list might have seen those same names turn up. Hence SCO's case. However for SCO to actually prove anything beyond conjecture -which isn't admissible in court- will prove extremely difficult, as the author says. The presented code that SCO has been showing the NDA signees is possibly taken form Unix (SysV) or AIX but is very likely to be some sort of common use code that exists in just about every OS known. If the code is a ubiquitous as the author feels, then it is likely that the court will not rule in SCO's favour. That would be the death knell for SCO because it would open the doors for just about everyone on the earth to sue SCO for issues ranging from code theft to harrasment.
3.SCO is mainly creating a fog of war in order to frighten people, just as IBM is claiming.
4.I am less worried know than I was before I read the article.
The worst possible outcome, is that, with the current US government using the fear of terrorism weapon as an excuse to invade countries, ruin the economy, support corrupt corporations, that the court would in fact rule in SCO's favour. The outcome of that would almost certainly be that IBM will use it's patents to sue SCO on hundreds of accounts and will certainly appeal the case until it gets to the supreme court. I am pretty sure that SCO would eventually lose, but the damage to OSS in the USA would be done. The court procedings will have minimal effect outside the the USA. I am pretty sure that no European court will give any chance to SCO of winning a case against an OS that was origionally developed in Finland and is a major source of income in Germany (SuSE). It would be interesting in this case to see if a software split would occur, with software developement in the USA totally encumbered by legal issues, leaving only Microsoft able to peddle it's wares with success there, and OSS taking over outside the USA . Of course this is only conjecture and speculation.
I was shown a little of the copied code. Admittedly, I can't tell you what I saw, but I did form the opinion that it was not in the kernel proper. In all probability, the code is more important to Silicon Graphics' Altix servers than to average x86 Linux users.
Ugh.. Altix is Itanium (AKA ia64.) This sounds very much like the code I pointed out yesterday. (ate_utils.c in Linux -vs- malloc.c in versions of Unix up to at least System3)
A couple of things people have pointed out about why the example I found should be legit:
(1) It's in BSD... No, I'm no expert on BSD history but from what I've read the settlement happened between BSD 4.3 and 4.4. Anything prior to 4.4 probably doesn't count since the whole reason BSD won is that they had rewritten all of the code. BSD3 contains pretty much an exact copy of malloc.c from Sys3, but the version in 4.2 looks newer than the version SGI used. I'd assume it's even more different in BSD 4.3 and 4.4.
(2) The code is common knowledge. This same form of malloc has been around longer than the C language. This sounds good, but it's hard to believe the code was written independently. The comments, structure, and variable names seem a bit too much to be coincidence.
(3) Caldera released the code for all versions of Unix prior to and including Sys3 under a BSD-style license. This is definitely the best argument, but SGI didn't include a "(c)Caldera 2001" in the file. The dates in SGI's copyright statment in that file are also out of line with the date of the Caldera offer, and it's easy to show that ate_utils.c was around prior to 23 Jan 2002. (Check the 2.4.17 ia64 port on Kernel.org)
The real question is why would SGI use versions of malloc and free that trace their lineage all the way back to 1973 Bell Labs when there are untainted, free, and better written versions of these functions available.
There is more to Technologies developed by other companies as add-ons to SysV were incorporated into Linux. This is not copyright infringement at all, but violates contracts signed by the original parties. than just that.
To be specific, SCO is claiming that the addons are a "derivative work" of System V.
Consider the definition of "derivative work" found in Title 17 of the U.S. code:
A ''derivative work'' is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ''derivative work''.
From this definition it appears that for something to be a "derivative work" it would need to be substantially the same overall work as the original work.
In other words, a "derivative work" of an operating system would itself be an operating system or something functioning largely as an operating system. Or it could be code copied from the original operating system into another operating system.
The original work is still there in some form as a part of the derivative work.
In this case, the RCU code developed by Sequent, the JFS code regardless of whether it is the original AIX version or the original OS/2 version, and any other code developed directly by IBM, Sequent, or other sources apart from AT&T/Novell/SCO are not by themselves derivative works because they do not embody anything close to the original work.
They are not a recasting, a transformation, or an adaptation of the original work.
They are not derived from the original work.
They do not embody the original work.
They do not contain the original work or elements of the original work.
They are not revisions of the original work.
They are the modifications that can be applied to the original work to produce a derivative work.
SCO's definition of "derivative work" does not match up at all with any notion I hold about what is and what is not a derivative work.
Remember - this weeks version of SCOs complaint is a contract matter between SCO and IBM. Copyright is NOT the issue. The code is not the issue. Linux is not the issue. The code is a blind.
/usr/src/uts/uts for all to see.
What SCO want to do is invalidate all existing Unix licenses so that all Unix rights revert to SCO. By then arguing that ALL Unix-like code is a derivative work they will claim that all unix-like code, no matter who wrote it, is actually SCOs.
By this means SCO hopes to profit from the work of hundreds of thousands of coders who worked for no pay on the original AT&T Unix, BSD Unix, Linux etc as well as all the commercial developement done by IBM, HP, SGI etc etc.
But SCOs entire argument is based on the "trade secret" that is the Unix sources. If anyone can show that SCO and previous owners of the rights to Unix sources have NOT taken care of their trade secret, SCO has NO case whatsoever. This is what ESR is doing right now by gathering evidence that Unix source code was widely available to people who did not sign any NDA at the time.
Fortunately, it's almost trival to discover evidence that Unix code has been widely available during the 1990s. Many commercial releases of Unix back then included source. For example, Amdahls UTS was a Unix for the IBM390 including multiprocessor support that was distributed widely with the sources in
BTW I suspect that it was Fujitsu, not SUN, that was the other big unix company that recently bought a license from SCO...
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
As from the article, SCO hates BSD too, if SCO wins, and they decide to go after BSD, they will also be taking on Microsoft, since the entire Microsoft TCP/IP stack is based off of BSD's implementation.
Apparently, SCO owns everything worthwhile in the last 20 years of computer technology, TCP/IP, and heck, probably even the OSI 7 layer model!
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
I guess I find this whole thing kinda scary, but for a different reason.
If any time you look at another peice of code, and then code something similar you are making a dirivative work - how much proprietary software should be covered by the GPL? This would mean that because I studied how Linux did scheduling, I couldn't ever work with any type of scheduling ever without GPLing it. It could even be taken to mean that anyone who has ever looked at GPL'd code could never develop proprietary software!
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that all of this has some scary consequences - not just for Linux. Sounds like I need to get a Law degree and work for the FSF, that's where the real money is going to be in the future :)
If you have a copy of the Lions Book, flip to line 2527. Then look at lines 87 through 205 of /usr/src/linux/arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c .
atefree and atealloc are verbatim copies of UNIX 6th Edition's malloc and free. The only changes are mapping the ancient C compilerism "=+" to "+=", some comment changes, some ASSERTs, and a spinlock. The code is undeniably copied.
After all, as the author points out, pretty much everything in current software is a derivative of what's gone earlier.
Using this argument, surely:
- Perl is derived from C, sed, awk, etc.
- Ada (design commissioned by US DoD, no less) is derived from Pascal, Algol and many others
- virtually every procedural language is derived from Algol
- MS Windows and the Mac UI are derived from X Windows and/or Xerox PARC's work (not 100% sure about the sequence of these, but the point still stands if the list has to be reordered)
- (add other examples till you get tired of it)
My point is that this is an entire industry built on "standing on the shoulders of giants". Nobody, *nobody* creates anything entirely from scratch.
Ridiculous derivations aside, I'd have thought that if SCO's (re-)definition of "derivative works" stands up, then surely all x86-based servers would be derived from IBM's original PC. After all, that's tangible hardware you can put your hands on such that a relative layman could see obvious derivations, not a bunch of lines of code where any proof of illegal copying is going to depend on accepting CVS-type logs as solid evidence. If the US legal system holds this to be true, then that could be used to kill off all non-IBM x86 hardware development since the early 1980s.
God forbid that Ada Lovelace's (frequently credited as "the first programmer") descendants read this rubbish and call their lawyers for a chat...
So, could SCO be saying that anything written in C or C++ or... wait, how about C#, is also a derivative work of Unix.
In that case, why stop there, you can pretty much sue everybody under that assumption.
I think, just like the author has mentioned, they cannot really get a decent case against Linux. All we have to do is a source compare on one of those old Caldera distros. And if it turns out there - well, SCO has distributed the source code themselves... Did people actually use caldera?
And since they are claiming that JFS and SMP and other components contributed to Linux by IBM are coming from AIX, that remains just an assumption. Do they have a source for AIX? Of course they don't, i hope they don't. Good luck proving that one, buddy!
Goot times!