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USL vs BSDI Documents
Dibyendu Majumdar writes "Dennis Ritchie has posted some court papers from the lawsuit by USL against BSDI about UNIX intellectual property. Some of the SCO claims, such as identical comments in the code, etc. also occur in the claims made by USL. Interesting read in the context of SCO vs IBM case."
Bzzt, sorry. C++ is an ANSI standard, and ANSI have some pretty tough rules regarding standards submissions. SCO might "own" C++, but they don't own the C++ ANSI standard.
Not the same SCO, but it's pretty much the same SCO UNIX. (Meaning OpenServer/XENIX, not the UnixWare that the lawsuit revolves around.)
BTW, Linux also has a "SCO binary emulation mode" called iBCS or (confusingly) LinuxABI.
Um.. Read the post again. It's not a MozillaZine interview, it's a MozillaQuest "interview". MozillaQuest has a long history of BS, so take everything you read there with a gigantic grain of salt.. Why hasn't SCO's claim to C++ been reported elsewhere since March 4 when this was posted?
Personally, I think that a claim to C++ would have a much wider impact than a claim to SCO code being put into Linux, were it true. Most UNIX/Linux code is still written in C, but the primary language in the Windows world is C++. (well.. MS C++)
End of line..
He's probably talking about Cfront. Never expect a suit to know the difference between a standard and an implementation :)
Cfront was the first C++ implementation. It worked by translating C++ code to C (in fact, it started out as a simple preprocessor), and as a result it has all kinds of problems with fancier C++ constructs, such as exceptions, STL, and inline functions. According to Mozilla's portability guidelines, the SCO and HP C++ compilers are still based on it.
In November, 1994 I was a plaintiff's expert witness in the
.... essentially putting
case of Automated Securities Clearance(ASC) vs. Securities Application
Applications (SAI), Inc. We (ASC) contended that SAI had misappropriated
trade secrets by taking source code of the popular BRASS Nasdaq trading
system and developing a competing product.
By examining the source code of the 2 systems, I was able to find
a very small amount (several hundred lines out of about 500,000) of
identical code, some with identical comments, formatting, etc.
However, in our case, we successfully argued that this small amount wasn't
the extent of the damage, rather it was the dna fingerprint that
proved that the original BRASS code was used as a "reference" for
the competing product -- and that the extent of the misappropriation
was well beyond the actual duplicate lines shown as evidence (especially
since the identical lines were at a low-level infrastructure layer
which we argued was necessary for anything else to work...)
The judge agreed -- imposing an injunction on SAI, and as punitive
damages imposing an additional injunction
SAI out of business. The case isn't 100% relevant given some pretty
bad conduct of the SAI folks (ex-ASC employees) and the judge's finding
that they had been "disingenuous" on the stand, but it does provide some
precendent for small amounts of code being used to 'prove' a larger
infringement.
In particular, the judge found that identical comments do have value --
representing 'trial and error', evolution, or labor that went into the
original and that was used to advantage by the copier. This holds
true even for copied 'dead code' that is never even executed.
IANAL, but those interested should consult the records of the
Superior Court of NJ, Chancery Division, Hudson County, Docket # C-28-94.
In a strange coincidence, the lawyers for the defendant (SAI) were
"Crummy, Del Deo, Dolan...." -- the same firm that was on the other side
for the USL vs. BSDI case (I just noticed from Dennis Ritchie's links...)
~