Open Source Community Approaches SCO

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek has an article about the open source community approaching SCO. SCO now says there are over a million lines of offending code in Linux and they still won't show them to anybody."

Comments

Over 1,000

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Over 1 mil? Does anyone know how many lines of code there are in the linux kernel?

Re:Over 1,000

[Kewjoe]

it has 1,000,001

that 1 line that isn't offending is

# Made by Linus Torvald

Re:Over 1,000

[Surak]

~4.4 million. They're saying at least 1/4 of the code is Unix System V. Yeah, whatever.

Re:Over 1,000

[iapetus]

Google does. According to this site:

Linux 2.5.37 (Sep 2002) is 5100081 lines of code, 152 MB.

So according to SCO, almost 20% of Linux is copied directly from their code. I can't believe they're even seriously trying any more, what with this and their blatant misreading of copyright law claiming that licenses allowing multiple copies to be made are invalid.

Re:Over 1,000

[mopslik]

According to here:

Linux 0.01 (Sep 1991) is 10239 lines of code, 0.2 MB.
Linux 0.10 (Dec 1991) is 17750 lines of code, 0.4 MB.
Linux 0.99 (Dec 1992) is 81091 lines of code, 2.2 MB.
Linux 1.0.0 (Mar 1994) is 176250 lines of code, 4.7 MB.
Linux 1.2.0 (Mar 1995) is 310950 lines of code, 8.4 MB.
Linux 2.0.0 (Jun 1996) is 777956 lines of code, 22 MB.
Linux 2.2.0 (Jan 1999) is 1800847 lines of code, 52 MB.
Linux 2.4.0 (Jan 2001) is 3377902 lines of code, 100 MB.
Linux 2.5.37 (Sep 2002) is 5100081 lines of code, 152 MB.

Re:Over 1,000

[mordicus]

2.4.20 is roughly 3.5 million lines, although about 2.5 million lines of it is drivers. The SMP code (all platforms) seems to be ~15000 lines of which ~800000 lines is copied verbatim from sysV.

Re:Over 1,000

[R.Caley]

So according to SCO, almost 20% of Linux is copied directly from their code.

You have to remember that they reformatted it one character per line. They are claiming the whitespace.

Re:Over 1,000

[Lord_Slepnir]

Here are the offending lines:

*/
/*
{
}
while(1)
else {
else
#include <stdio>
#include <iostream>
do
do {
return;

If you look at the source code, clearly almost 1/5th of the lines are comprised of these lines of their propriatary code. We must seriously take the effort to remove these lines and respect their hard work and contributions to linux.

Re:Over 1,000

[iainl]

Meanwhile, over at news.com they are reporting more announcements from the conference:

"The SCO Forum crowd applauded when SCO executives announced that an upcoming version of its OpenServer--code-named Legend--will support the latest releases of Java; include new hardware support, such as universal serial bus (USB) printer drivers; contain expanded security features; and provide better compatibility with Microsoft Windows through version 3 of Samba, which is developed by an open-source group. The OpenServer update is scheduled to debut in the fourth quarter of next year."

So we can safely assume that none of the infringing lines of code come from the (working for years now) USB, Samba or Java support. My goodness I'd forgotten just how monumentally useless SCO Unix is.

Re:Over 1,000

[FJ]

Perhaps a more informative estimate would be to take the difference in the number of lines in the 2.2 kernel vs the 2.4 kernel, since SCO claims 2.2 is fine but 2.4 has copied code.

3,377,902 (2.4) - 1,800,847 (2.2) = 1,577,055

In other words, SCO claims that 2/3 of the improvements in the 2.4 series kernel belong to them. That is a rather unrealistic statement since a lot of those enhancements didn't come from IBM.

Re:Over 1,000

[NoUse]

The funny thing is when all this started there was supposedly no code in the kernel.

Then two weeks later the same guy claims that UnixWare source "is all over the place"

While these quotes probably wouldn't be too useful as evidence in court. It does well to show that these guys are throwing darts to choose how to go forth with this legal campaign.

Whoa,

[archeopterix]

One million lines!

Soon we'll hear zillion infinities lines plus their dads being bigger than our dads.

Heise News shows a code:

[Anonymous Coward]

Heise News shows the code:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.0 8.03-00 0/imh1.jpg

The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI:
http://www.funet.fi/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/v 2.4/pa tch-html/patch-2.4.19/linux-2.4.19_arch_ia64_sn_io _ate_utils.c.html

Does this code come from:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ ken/mal loc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr /sys/sys/mal loc.c.html

Re:Heise News shows a code:

[Trigun]

Clickable links

Heise News shows the code:

The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI:

Does this code come from: Here (V5) or Here (V7)?

Re:Heise News shows a code:

[hotair]

Am I missing something or are there syntax errors in the code in the jpeg image pointed to by the parent?
if (size==0)
return) ((ulong_t NULL);
...

In which language does this compile?

Re:Heise News shows a code:

[Coward the Anonymous]

Well, if you look at the freely available and downloadable code for Unix System III, which I nabbed a while back, you can see this code for malloc:

malloc(mp, size)
struct map *mp;
{
register unsigned int a;
register struct map *bp;

for (bp=mp; bp->m_size; bp++) {
if (bp->m_size >= size) {
a = bp->m_addr;
bp->m_addr += size;
if ((bp->m_size -= size) == 0) {
do {
bp++;
(bp-1)->m_addr = bp->m_addr;
} while ((bp-1)->m_size = bp->m_size);
}
return(a);
}
}
return(0);
}

I'm sure this code is included in every Unix internals textbook ever made. I bet you if you grab one of the BSD's malloc.c file, it will look at lot like this too. How many ways can you implement malloc?!

Re:Heise News shows a code:

[JAgostoni]

It's good to know that Unix/Linux programmers are following good code practice with comments, meaningful variable names, and maintainable code.

they're showing some....

[jeffy124]

but they're still bluring out other parts

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5065286.html

Re:they're showing some....

[drinkypoo]

McBride said that pattern-recognition experts SCO hired have ferreted out a slew of infringing code in Linux. "They have found already a mountain of code," he said. "The DNA of Linux is coming from Unix."

In other words, both Linux and Unix are written using C syntax. Who'd have thought it!?

Hmmmmph

[HiQ]

...in which Raymond said that if there was infringing code in the Linux kernel, "our community wants no part of it and will remove it.

I don't think that SCO wants those lines removed, because their whole business plan now seems based on those lines being in there.

Re:Hmmmmph

[Snags]

Exactly.

I wonder, isn't there some requirement for a plaintiff to try to resolve a dispute *before* going to the courts? By refusing to let the kernel developers fix the kernel, they're insisting on the infringement rather than trying to fix it.

Re:Hmmmmph

[jez_f]

if SCO is willing to take the honest, cooperative path forward, so are we.

This is the point of the whole press release. From here on in, the OSS community can point out that they are willing to work with SCO to remove the offending code. Refusing to do this will make SCOs 'licence fees' much more like extortion.
This move could be very important later on.

Not much new there

[cspenn]

Not much new there, except to say that SCO must be using the RIAA's supply of calculators to determine how many lines of code are infringing. There are approximately 30 million lines of code in the kernel:

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/

And SCO is claiming that 3.3% of the Linux kernel is theirs? From a company that did nothing with Linux until it acquired a GPL distribution? Right.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Chris
Ever wonder how APR works? Stop on by!

If you don't pay SCO their licensing fees...

[Junta]

They'll remove one MILLION lines of code...

Note they said "offending code"...

[tbase]

...maybe they mean lines of code that offends Microsoft - all of them. Or maybe each line counts as one, but the ones that really tack them off count as 3 or 4 lines. Or maybe they're running at 640x480 with Word Wrap on... Ok, I'll stop now.

1/3 of Linux code stolen?

[angst7]

As of 2.4 it looks like there were approximately 3.4 Million lines of code in the kernel See Here.

So roughly 1/3 of linux is directly copied from unix? Gimme a break.

Heise News shows code

[Anonymous Coward]

Heise News shows code:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.0 8.03-00 0/imh1.jpg

The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI:
http://www.funet.fi/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/v 2.4/pa tch-html/patch-2.4.19/linux-2.4.19_arch_ia64_sn_io _ate_utils.c.html

Does this code come from:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ ken/mal loc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr /sys/sys/mal loc.c.html

Re:Heise News shows code

[mocm]

And did you read the "encrypted" text below the commentary (greek letters) on the Unix side:
As part of the kernel evolution towards modular naming, the functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. Compatibility will be maintained by the following asembler code: (also see mfree/rmfree below)

There is not even C code following. So SCO copied the commentary and than put something else in the file.

Re:Heise News shows code

[Ami Ganguli]

Bruce Perens pointed out over at lwn.net that Caldera put this particular code under a BSD license in 2000.

Who?

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Who exactly is this story talking about? The "Open Source Community" is being represented in the article by someone called Jeff Gerhardt. Familiar name? Not to me... seems to be the host of a radio show about Linux.

The fact that he has an email from Eric Raymond hardly qualifies him as a representative of the entire Open Source community. If you read the quotes from the email it is not an approach to SCO either.

If this article said that OSI, FSF, OSDL, Linus, etc. had approached SCO it might have been worth posting. In its current form it would be better titled "Some guy with radio show hands out copies of email from Eric Raymond".

John.

part 2 filled

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Claim that there are IP violations in linux
2. Prevent any linux developer from removing the violations from the source
3. Profit with license fees

the nda agreement is intentionally made so strict, open source community wants to remove the million lines of infrigting code, but if they do that, sco can't charge license fees from it, so naturally they won't let anyone see what they have

just wondering

[cockroach2]

why does anyone care? they can't sue anyone without showing the "proof", so just relax and don't care. and stop writing stories about it.

Wont show them to anyone... except germans?

[Starborn]

A german website has released images of some code SCO claims linux copied. You can read the article (in german) here. (the code is in the two images)

We've been discussing this on the gentoo forums just now, and we've found that:
1) Their example is from the IA64 port of linux 2.4 (its not in 2.6)
2) Their example can be traced back to 2.11BSD
3) The greek in the sco code is actually english, with the font changed to english (Stupid obfucation attempt) heres what it says:

"As part of the kernel evolution towards modular naming, the functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. Compatibility will be maintained by the following assembler code: (also see mfree/rmfree below)"

We're still discussing it on the gentoo forums here

Next week's news:

[Phekko]

SCO spokesman reveals the actual number of lines stolen to be "a bit over 174,5 billion" and that SCO still refuses to show any of them.

In related news SCO now demands $5999 for a license

(Signature removed for security reasons)

Slides from SCO Forum2003 show some code

[OMG]

This is from a heise.de article .

Two slides show some code (1 2)
that may come from Fifth Edition UNIX.

"Offending" code?

[Tsar]

"SCO now says there are over a million lines of offending code in Linux..."

They might be referring to the commented code. You know, RMS can get pretty ribald with his comment blocks when he's got a few cans of Jolt in him...

More

[Captain_Chaos]

Apparently, he said "millions", so that would be at least 40% of the code. I can't believe how farcical this whole circus is getting. It's like SCO is actively trying to make sure they'll lose big by coming up with more and more ridiculous arguments. I feel like I'm watching a bad movie or something...

Chewbacca

[b1t r0t]

Does Chewbacca not have fur on his arms? Does Chewbacca not have fur on his legs? Does Chewbacca not have fur on his face? Does Chewbacca not have over a million hairs in his fur?

If Chewbacca is furry, you must convict!

Linux is Dead

[nt2UNIX]

You know, at first I that it was kinda funny that SCO was doing this. Having read a lot of stuff about ATT and BSD. It seemed almost a right of passage for Linux into the real world.

Now I tempted to install Linux on a box in protest. Hold on a minute, what I'm I saying.

Long Live FreeBSD!!!!!!

A fish story:

[sockit2me9000]

Darl's siting on a chaise lounge, drinking a forty and gazing around at his spitting chicken Camaro on cinderblocks in his front yard, he's talking to his sons, Darl, his brother Darl and his other brother Darl. "So, this one time ah wuz writing some proprietary code fer my operating system when along came this big ol fish and took mah bait. That damn thing had to be taken a good 80 lines of code. Real purty code it wuz, too." "paw, I thought you said it wuz 200." "That's what ah meant" The other brother Darl looks confused, "Ah thought you said it was ah couple thousand" "Boy, you questioning me? Ah said it wuz a millions line of code. I mean it wuz HUGE!" Old Maw Redmond calls from the cabin, "What wuz fish doing in that lake anyway? That's our watering hole, not theres. We'll just have to start washing yer britches in that there lake, that'll clear em out. Now git up her and get yer vittles." And in the darkness of the lake a giant blue beast stirs.

One Million, that's incredible, but is it?

[donscarletti]

How IBM could submit 1000000 lines of code, in the space in time that it would require to copy them without Linus Torvalds noticing is beyond me. After some rough calculations I worked out that that would mean that Linux-2.4 has more in common with sys V than linux-2.2

But no, there is a logical answer to this. Evident if one RTFAs, as the the quote from which the number was taken from is by Jeff Gerhardt, not an SCO spokesman nor anything like it:

we want to be able to look at the offending code without prejudicing our future careers and so that we can remove any offending code, even if that is a million lines

That is not a reference that SCO has claimed there are 1000000 lines stolen, that is a comment saying that even if they did, LINUX could be repaired. But I must consede that while SCO has not claimed this in this article I wouldn't be suprised if they did somewhere else.

Re:Over 1,000,000

[linuxtelephony]

Every time there's a press release the number grows. Just last week didn't they say something like 168,000 lines of code?

Now it's millionS -- not just 1, but plural, aka many. My guess, based on their claim of derivative work, is that they are saying that 5,100,081 (2.5.37, per previous post) lines are infringing. This doesn't mean they are direct copies, just infringing.

At first, SCO's action surprised and stunned me. Then it became funny to watch them "foaming at the mouth" in the various press releases. Now things are just getting annoying. I'll be glad when they're squashed and this is all over. I'll be even more glad if the SEC finally gets involved and wins a guilty verdict. Perhaps we should change the SCO logo to a crooked SCO, kind of like that crooked E from Enron?

Re:I know this is a flame...but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our old joke overlords, and remind them that as a Slashdot poster I would be useful in rounding people up to toil in their underground custard-pie caves.

Huh?

[carldot67]

First it was 186,000 then 892,000 now "over a million". Hmm, conflicts. There are other conflicts. For example, SCO wont show the code for fear that the OSS community will write round it, then we hear that it is so intertwined that rewriting would not be practical. Then there's the claim that "rocket scientists using advanced [data mining] tools" are credited with finding the in-doubt code.
Hmm. Students of data mining will be aware that given the right circumstances, "advanced [data mining] tools" will find evidence of Space Invaders code in MySQL and carrot DNA in the human genome - buts thats another story; after all there are only so many ways to implement an insertion sort or a tyrosine kinase.
It all backs up my suspicion that this SCO thing is all pretty dubious stuff.
As an aside: I have a simple technique to see if my kids have been naughty. I ask them what happened a couple of times and if the stories change or differ then I know theyve been up to no good. It never fails.
Messrs McBride and Sontag will therefore go to bed early tonight without a story.

Re:I know this is a flame...but...

[TheViffer]

Considering SCO repeats the same FUD and BS over and over again, why can't Slashdotters repeat the same jokes over and over?

Awww, poor baby

[Snags]

SCO CEO Darl McBride was going on a family vacation to Hawaii when the RedHat suit and IBM countersuit came up. Gee, it's too bad the nice man's free time was ruined by corporate litigation.

Oh, wait, many people develop Linux in their free time...

Did the Moderator miss the joke, or did I?

[abulafia]

The SMP code (all platforms) seems to be ~15000 lines of which ~800000 lines is copied verbatim from sysV.

So, am I to assume that the Linux kernel is 5333% infringing code?

Man, I wish I could code that efficiently.

an angry mob

[jmb-d]

Open Source Community Approaches SCO

[insert video clip of villagers with pitchforks and torches storming the castle here]

DON'T DO IT

[Robawesome]

This is exactly the kind of thing I was afraid of. This could hurt us, they will never approve a fair or no NDA, and this could hurt us and IBM enormously. The issue here is not whether or not there is unix code in linux. The issue is what that means.

SCO says it means "we own everyone else's work, too. So pay up."what it really means is that the code needs to be removed, no matter how preposterosly large SCO says it is. I have read IBM's counterclaim a few times and IBM, as I recall, does not deny that there is unix code in linux. It just says it didn't put any there.

Remember, SCO showed code to a few dozen people under that NDA. They believed that there was, indeed, unix code in linux. HOWEVER, that does not mean what SCO says it means. Just because some code happens to be there does not mean that we are subject to SCOs' illegal whim. They are still screwed for dozens of reasons, whether there is any unix code in there or not.

It does not matter how big the alleged copying is, the only legal thing for SCO to do was to send a message to linus, stating line for line what the code was, ask for it to be removed, and then possibly sue whoever put it there for damages. had they done that, their actions would have been unpopular, but not illegal.

Relax, everything SCO says is going into a file at IBM, to be used as evidence against them in court.

Isn't samba GPL

[nuggz]

How can they distribute samba?
It is GPL, and they are arguing it is an invalid license.

Unless the agree to the GPL, they can't distribute samba. Isn't this a stupid strategy?

Here is the linke to the story, look at the bottom of it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5065286.html? tag=f d_lede1_hed

Re:Isn't samba GPL

[rosie_bhjp]

no they seem to think that they can agree to the GPL but not be bound to it because it is 'invalid' and is overruled by federal law which prohibits making copies of software.

SCO is double plus ungood!

100,000,000,000

[Sebby]

Soon we'll see McBride putting his pinky to his mouth and say "100 billion lines of code!"

SCO Forum

[iwaku]

SCO: You must pay us $699 for
[big sound effect]
70 lines of code!
[people laughing cruelly]
Sorry. One million lines of code!!
[dramatic music]

C'mon, SCO, Show SOME lines

[Esion Modnar]

I mean if you have a million lines of your code in there, what's a mere hundred lines? Or ten?

That way, even if everybody ran off and fixed those lines, you still have well over 900,000 lines of evidence (according to you) in your back pocket.

And you would gain (maybe) some credibility. Not to mention what it'd do to your stock price.

Contract issue lines , not copyright lines

[LightSail]

Darl is using a smoke screen: the million lines are not SCOX copyrighted, They were Sequent and IBM copyright. SCOX has a small chance of proving contract violation, but cannot prove copyright claim to Sequent/IBM code. Even winning the lawsuit does not give SCOX the copyright status to the donated code. The SCOX copyrighted code that may be in the Linux kernel is most likely either BSD, previously published algorisms, an open standard or hardware vendor release. These are not exclusive to SCOX. If SCOX had actual hard evidence, they would be using it to prove the point with a small public display. Any public display of code would easily be connected to the actual source outside of SCOX, so no show without nda. My feeling is that none of Linux is an actual copyright violation of SCOX copyright. This entire situation is a Hail Mary to increase market cap of SCOX, then use that value to buy profitable companies. Once SCOX has converted the inflated stock into additional sources of income, they will settle and rename the company to reflect its new identity. They may even end up by donating UNIX to open source to make amends, once they have milked the lawsuit and publicity for every dollar possible.

McBride == McCarthy

[CryBaby]

Press responding to SCO allegations: "Mr. McBride, exactly how many lines of linux kernel code did you say belong to SCO Unix?"

Reporters questioning Sen. John Iselin in "The Manchurian Candidate" (Iselin is a thinly veiled McCarthy for those who haven't seen the movie): "Senator Iselin, exactly how many U.S. Senators did you say belong to the communist party?"

It's laughable, but apparently this old PR trick still works. Let's please keep the focus on the existence / nonexistence of IP infringements in linux rather than backing up SCO's baseless claims by discussing the quantity of IP infringements.

Copyright violation

[nuggz]

So their logic is.

Distribute GPL software.
Prove the GPL is invalid because copyright law does not allow you to let others make copies.
Continue to distribute GPL software since copyright law no longer applies when a license is ruled invalid.

This does not seem like a strong strategy.
I think a good strategy to fight this would be for the Samba team to get an injunction on their new products pending SCOs acceptance of the GPL.

They then have 2 choices, ditch Samba, agree to the GPL, or fight against willfull copyright violation.

Re:You think SCO has dads?

[LittleBigLui]

Even if they do have dads

Be assured, they do. 70. No, hundreds. No, wait. MILLIONS of them.

they don't know who

They know who, they just won't tell anyone else.

Apart from that, laws of physics dictate that you can't create energy or mass, and hence this whole procreating-parent-child-father-mother-thingie is ILLEGAL anyhow.

(Just when we thought that 3.-???-4.-Profit!!!-Soviet-Russia was bad enough...)

Corporate Death Penalty

[Ron Harwood]

I can't believe they're even seriously trying any more, what with this and their blatant misreading of copyright law claiming that licenses allowing multiple copies to be made are invalid.

The problem is this: there is no downside for SCO... they can say and do anything without fear - and there's the very remote chance that they might win something. It's like buying lottery tickets.

There needs to be a downside for crap like this - once it's proven to be a complete fabrication. Imprision the CEO for his company's wilfull purjury... seize their assets... stop all business functions. Basically - a lethal injection for the company.

You can bet shareholders will have something to say about overly litigious companies then!

Re:Corporate Death Penalty

[Zocalo]

In the US maybe, but not here in the UK where we really do have a corporate death penalty. It's actually called a "Compulsory Winding Up Order" and can be issued by a court when a company if found to have sufficiently dubious trading/financial practices to make it a liabilty to do business with them.

Besides, who do you think can buy the most law makers - IBM or SCO?

Dr. Evil redux

[Valdrax]

I keep flashing back to Austin Powers 2...

Dr. Evil: ...We demand payment for our ONE TRILLION lines of UNIX code. [puts pinky finger to edge of mouth]
[IBM board bursts into laughter.]
IBM CEO: One trillion lines of code? [laughs] There isn't that many lines in the entire GNU system! I mean, you might as well demand payment for a billion-jillion-bazillion lines of code!

SCO code shown = BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO did a big dog and pony show yesterday at their conference. They also raised their claims, and according to them, there are "millions of lines" of offending code which they have identified by "rocket scientists" using "spectral recognition" and "pattern analysis".

To convince SCOforum attendees of their case, SCO showed obscured slides which supposedly proved copying.

Research reveals that the code fragment SCO showed in one of their slides, doesn't even belong to SCO - it's from BSD. See for yourself, the code originated from, and is Copyright 1986 Regents of the University of California! And, while they might have more up their sleeve, it's is revealing that the most compelling example they can show at their forum, doesn't even belong to them!

Clickable versions!

[aug24]

Heise News shows code:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.08.03-00 0/imh1.jpg

The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI:
http://www.funet.fi/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/v2.4/pa tch-html/patch-2.4.19/linux-2.4.19_arch_ia64_sn_io _ate_utils.c.html

Does this code come from:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ken/mal loc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/sys/sys/mal loc.c.html

Plus...

For version referencing, look here

Justin.

License change

[coyote-san]

I'm not sure how many contributers there are to the Samba project, but it's almost certainly far fewer than to the Linux kernel, GNU tool chain, etc.

The bottom line is that they may be able to take direct action: change the license to "GPL-SCO." That's a stock GPL license with an extra clause superceding all others and explicitly prohibiting the use of the software on SCO systems, on any system owned by SCO regardless of the OS used, or distribution in any form by SCO or its successors. Finally, since SCO is claiming that none of these licenses are valid anyway there would be a final clause inserted by the lawyers that basically say that if the rest of the license is invalidated then SCO owes a licensing fee of US$1,000,000,000 per CPU, payable immediately. A billion dollars/CPU to the people who actually wrote the code is no less unreasonable than SCO trying to collect a kilobuck/CPU from Linux users who never invited SCO to the table.

In short, if they want to support MS products but refuse to accept the standard license, they can damn well write the code themselves. The same applies to any other application they use.

This is a bit more direct that what the GCC group is supposedly considering - dropping SCO hardware from the list of supported hardware - but it's clear that SCO isn't going to stop until the feds get off their ass and start prosecuting these clowns.

Comment lines could be damning

[pcause]

A number of articles on this issue point out that many copied lines are comments and that the comments have the identical spelling errors that lines of *nix code do. If this is true, and if the lines of code are truly owned by SCO this is very damning.

Someone might make the case that given a task to do the code to accomplish the task could look very similar or nearly identical. Bit comments? And spelling errors? Not a chance. Comments can be rare enough and programmers idiosyncratic enough that it stretches credulity to think that multiple programmers would write the same comment with the same spelling error.

The issue is whether or not these lines came into UNIX from another source, such as from BSD. If the code came from BSD, perhaps TCP stack or utilities, than SCO really has no claim. The other possibility is that it is in driver code. This gets murkier.

I don't think AT&T ever made the APIs for drivers public. You had to have a non-disclosure agreement with them or a license. But it is possible that you could replace the AT&T interfaces with Linux interfaces and had the code look identical in 90% of its content and not be a copy, since the device parts would be identical, but they would be owned by the driver writer. One exception is if the driver writer started with an AT&T driver and modified it. In this case, SCO wins.

There was a 386 reference port of UNIX done for AT&T by Intel and Interactive Systems. As part of that port there were a number of driver provided to AT&T. They are all owned by AT&T and drivers that were built starting with those drivers would be a violation of the license. One itneresting fact is that Interactive went into the packaged UNIX business and their x86 UNIX was eventually bought by Sun and was the base of Solaris for the x86.

Again, it all comes down to the details: which parts of the code are we talkign about.

False confidence on Federal Copyright law

[Macka]

Mark Heise, a partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, the primary law firm representing SCO, said that he found it interesting that with all its patents, IBM was arguing for open source. "We believe that any GPL claim by IBM is pre-empted by Federal Copyright law and are very comfortable with our position on that," he said.

It would seem that Mark Heise is talking out of his backside again. This article, a fascinating read, quotes Eben Moglen, Professor of Law at Columbia University as saying:

You don't need permission to use copyrighted work - there is no exclusive right to use, unlike in Patent law which involves the rights to 'make, use or sell'.

Read the article, it's quite an eye opener.

Macka

Anyone else get the feeling...

[Rogerborg]

That this is starting to read like a The Onion article? You know, one of the recent ones that starts with a moderately amusing title - "SCO claims 'All your code base are belong to us'" - but then just dribbles on and on until you get tired of reading it.

SCO are trolling for dollars. We should stop helping them out by disseminating their bullshit. We shouldn't even bother to refute it, because by doing so, we make it looks as though there's something there that needs refuting. Nuh huh. Until they back up their claims by listing the source, there is no story here. They're simply begging for publicity to sell shares to pointy haired morons. Let's not be a party to that any more.

SCO reminds me of Senator Joe McCarthy:

[Futurepower(R)]

From the Slashdot story: "SCO now says there are over a million lines of offending code in Linux and they still won't show them to anybody."

This reminds me of Senator Joseph McCarthy's 1950 Communists in the State Department speech. See the end of the article for a quote from Senator McCarthy:

"I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy."

Senator Joseph McCarthy said he would show Dean Acheson, then U.S. Secretary of State, the list, but only under special conditions that often changed. McCarthy said: "It would be a waste of effort to give Acheson the names, then have him deny they are Communists and we can not get the records."

The number of Communists McCarthy said were in the U.S. State Department also often changed, too. Soon it was "81 subversives":

The article cited above says, "Senator Lucas of Illinois, Democratic leader, repeatedly tangled with McCarthy, who also said he has case histories of 81 subversives--including what he called a 'big three'--who are working in and with the State Department. Lucas challenged McCarthy to name names. McCarthy refused, saying Lucas or any other interested authorities could get the names at McCarthy's office."

"The Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy" (See the end of the article.) "Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy died soon after the censure, at the age of 48, of hepatitis and liver disease related to alcoholism."

Senator McCarthy gave many people a big Red scare. However, in the end, everyone realized that he was a liar.

Re:SCO's Got Copyright Backwards

[Croaker]

...keeping their code under wraps until they're in court seems to be a reasonable strategy to me. Their success depends on convincing the court, not the open source community.

I don't follow this reasoning. There's no reason to hold back identifying the infringing code, aside from hiding the fact they have nothing, or that the code that was "duplicated" actually made its way into the kernel through legal channels (i.e. SCO employees contributing the code).

SCO's management has in the past claimed that "telling you what is infringing will mean that people will take the code out of the kernel." This lays bare SCO's purpose... money. They hope to perpetually reap the benefits of claiming infringement, rather than letting the community clean up any leakage of propretary IP into Linux. Furthermore they are bullshitting that it would affect their case. All they would have to do is bring in a Red Hat CD with the source code for the infringing kernel, and show the offending code. The fact that the current kernel wouldn't have the infringing code is irrelevant to SCO's suit. They can still claim that the past infringement damaged their IP and hurt their business.