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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."
Over 1 mil? Does anyone know how many lines of code there are in the linux kernel?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Soon we'll hear zillion infinities lines plus their dads being bigger than our dads.
...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.
They'll remove one MILLION lines of code...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Heise News shows code:0 8.03-00 0/imh1.jpg
v 2.4/pa tch-html/patch-2.4.19/linux-2.4.19_arch_ia64_sn_io _ate_utils.c.html
/ ken/mal loc.c.htmlr /sys/sys/mal loc.c.html
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.
The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI:
http://www.funet.fi/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/
Does this code come from:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/us
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.
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
This is from a heise.de article .
Two slides show some code (1 2)
that may come from Fifth Edition UNIX.
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?
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
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.
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.
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
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]
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?!
-- Jason
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.
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.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.08.03-0
The code seems to come from arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c, copyright by SGI:a tch-html/patch-2.4.19/linux-2.4.19_arch_ia64_sn_io _ate_utils.c.html
http://www.funet.fi/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/v2.4/p
Does this code come from:l loc.c.html l loc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ken/ma
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/sys/sys/ma
Plus...
For version referencing, look here
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken