"Stolen" SCO Linux Code Snippets Leaked

stere0 writes "An article (in German) published on the German IT news site Heise includes two pictures (1, 2) of the "stolen" source code SCO claims to be theirs. Part of the first screenshot has been scrambled, the font has probably just been changed to Symbol; can anybody decipher it? I searched for the code snippets on Google. The code does indeed come from the kernel; the photographs show what seems to be lines 88-102 and 109-123 of /arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c from the 2.4 kernel tree. " Update: 08/19 16:39 GMT by M : LWN has a nice piece tracing the origins of the disputed code, and showing that SCO is simply lying.

Comments

oh no!

[krisp]

Quick, bust out vi and change all the variable names!

Re:oh no!

[BohKnower]

Every college student knows that you must change comments and variable names of the code you copy.

How could the IBM engineers miss it.

Re:oh no!

[Arker]

Every college student knows that you must change comments and variable names of the code you copy.
How could the IBM engineers miss it.

Obviously they were silly enough to believe that since they had every legal right to copy it, they didn't need to hide the copying.

No one expects the spanish inquisition!?

Re:oh no!

[anacron]

Anyone ever given serious thought that perhaps the SCO code was lifted from the Linux source? The SCO engineers obviously had the same level of access as everyone else in the public domain -- perhpas the case will come down to who can prove what was released when. .anacron

Re:oh no!

[mpe]

Anyone ever given serious thought that perhaps the SCO code was lifted from the Linux source?

Or maybe both came from a third party. Especially considering that the Linux version of the code is marked "Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc."

Re:oh no!

[harlows_monkeys]

Especially considering that the Linux version of the code is marked "Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc."

That would explain the "register" variables. That keyword has been ignored by compilers for a long time, and so when you see it in code, it is almost always old code, copied from somewhere.

Re:oh no!

[Arker]

Anyone ever given serious thought that perhaps the SCO code was lifted from the Linux source? The SCO engineers obviously had the same level of access as everyone else in the public domain -- perhpas the case will come down to who can prove what was released when. .anacron

That may be the case in many of their claimed 'infringing lines' but not in these two.

The first one shows comments (not code) which match. They're also straightforward descriptions of functionality, date back at least to 1979, and occur in a number of old unix versions which have been commonly read and used for teaching purposes for years, as well as the Lions book.

In this case the comment definately predates Linux so couldn't have been copied from Linux, but the fact it occurs in Linux code is not strong evidence of copyright infringement.

http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/32VKern/usr/src/ sys/sys/malloc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/Interdata_v6/usr/s ys/malloc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/Ausam/sys/ken/mall oc.c.html

The second section of code is copyright of and contributed by SGI, and concerns functionality that SysV doesn't have. It's only relevant on the assumption that SCOs theory that it owns every technology any Unix licensee ever added to their own version of Unix holds water, which means only if the court winds up throwing the entirety of copyright law and precedent out the window and writing new law just for SCOs benefit.

Re:oh no!

[captain_craptacular]

The problem is IBM only hires the top 5% of any given graduating class. Basically if you don't have a 3.75+ GPA, forget about it. Therefore they hire all the geeks who never considered cheating and don't know how to get by in the real world. If they just hired a real person as a "conformance officer" occasionally, such trivial mistakes wouldn't slip by.

Re:oh no!

[XO]

But it IS possible, without throwing out all copyright law. IF the Unix source licensing agreement included that all source derivatives belong to the primary Unix source owner, then the Unix license becomes just as viral as the GPL.

As the GPL requires that if you distribute a modified binary, you distribute the source ... the Unix license could require that if you modify the source, you give it back to the owner!

Re:oh no!

[Royster]

The last link shows the code apparently came from SGI. Isn't SCO claiming that IBM contributed the so-called infringing code?

No.

The accusations made by SCO have been very unclear. The IBM case is about acts by IBM which SCO claims breaches the IBM/AT&T contract. It involves contributing code IBM got by buying Sequent and by participating in Project Monterey. This technology includes RCU, NUMA, SMP and scalability.

Independantly, SCO claims that there are many lines of code copied from Sys V into Linux. They have not yet filed any copyright suit against anyone since they only just got the copyright registrations issued.

Don't confuse the two very different legal issues.

Re:oh no!

[ewhac]

when you see [the register keyword] in code, it is almost always old code, copied from somewhere.

...Or perhaps it's new code written by an old fart who knows through long, bitter experience that there's no such thing as an optimizing compiler.

I have yet to witness a compiler that did anything even remotely clever with register usage, much less correctly identify where the performance hot-spots were. Hell, I still use a couple of coding idioms that puzzle most people because of bugs in ancient compilers, or just because I know how the compiler should be turning the code into assembly.

So yeah, I still use register from time to time.

Schwab

Re:oh no!

[QuackQuack]

In my school, the people in CS who got the 3.75+ GPAs were the professional students, who were only willing to learn what would help them on the exams, but not anything useful. If it wasn't going to help them on their exam, or help them complete projects. they simply didn't want to know about it.

The "real" geeks who really cared about CS, didn't always score quite so high, but they had a passion for computers, and therefore learned things outside the curriculum and picked up more useful skills, tended to spend their free time "tinkering", and therefore their grades in other requisite Liberal Arts courses may have suffered a bit.

At one point, we had a professor for an "Operating Systems" course, who had lots of real world experience, and his teaching style was less academic and more focused more the real-world. This drove the "3.75+ professional students" crazy. They didn't know how to study for his course, because they actually had to think in ways they weren't used to. His course threatened their GPAs, so they protested. The "geeks" loved his course and got straight A's in it. Too bad the instructor was a bit of a push-over on grading, and ended up bending to the other students' demands, and ended pushing up their grades more than they deserved.

I'm not saying that everyone who has a high GPA is this kind of student. I'm just saying I wouldn't decide who to hire based on GPA alone, from on my personal experience.

Re:oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears that the second shot may be moot. It looks like a bitkeeper patch to the 2.5 tree may have removed the file that the code apearred in in it's entirety in early July of this year:

See here

Re:oh no!

[jrockway]

I've graded code many times, and doing that does not disguise anything! You'd be amazed how easy to tell when people change variable names, brackets, indentation, spacing, etc.

BTW, even if you've graded 100 projects, you'll know when you see copied code. It's truly obvious.

Re:oh no!

[Doomdark]

I guess you haven't met these professional students, then. I know it's a stereotype, but one that exists in the wild. People who get all stressed out from getting only 47 points out of 48 (even if grade is still the same), and go to complain, whine and try to biggie size the score. People who mostly talk about exams, preparing for them, whining about "not doing enough reading" (when they have been reading for past week); and usually getting high grades, being persistent perpetual movement machines they are.

For whatever it's worth I did get decent grades myself, without sweating too much about it. But fortunately I never got any of my jobs based on either grades, or even the degree I have. I wouldn't base my hiring decision on either alone either. My thinking is that skilled and talented people generally do get fairly good grades, but that reverse direction isn't quite as linear.

Of course, the stereotypic image only covers some of high-grade-average people; there are some truly smart people who do get straight A s no matter what (have met couple). But there are enough of those whose main skill really is studying and getting grades (one way or the other), without matching technical skills, that I would not rely too much on GPA or related rankings.

Translation of "symbol" section:

[*igor*]

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

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[johny_qst]

As all that they are demonstrating is a few lines of comments from their system v code where is the IP infringement? Comments may be part of the source, but am I wrong in assuming that comments are not included in the 'IP' concept that is being argued in SCO's case? If I copied just the notes in the margins of one of davinci's notebooks into the margins of my copy of 'stranger in a strange land 2: a parody by me' would that be infringement? Is SCO's claim really this weak, or are we really not going to see Code before IBM's lawyers drag it out of the SCO lawyers in an actual courtroom?

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Yohahn]

Others agree, they've been chatting about this on Linux weekly news:

see here

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[albalbo]

Consensus is that it's the obfuscation technique they've used to hide bits of code they didn't want to show. Heh, real-life rot-0 encryption :o)

The comments that have been obscured have been translated by numerous people, and the comments don't appear in any public source known to Google. Therefore, it seems to be genuine proprietary Unix that it comes from.

I wonder if anyone else took pictures of the presentation - apparently, there was a lot of 'obscured' code in the samples they were showing. It would be quite interesting to know what code was obscured: so far, none of the obscured code is in the Linux kernel, which is odd given that it was 'copied line-by-line'. If it was indeed copied, I would expect more than just the stuff which is already public domain.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Atzanteol]

Face it. There is stolen code in Linux. How much and how severe the value of the theft is to be determined but that there was theft is almost certain.

Sorry? The code snippet they show is from a 'malloc' implementation that is apparently much older than SysV, and also public domain! How is this 'stolen'?

Oh, wait. IHBT haven't I? Blast!

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[hcetSJ]

They can't use Symbol font as a substitution cypher!!! I did that in 3rd grade!!! I demand they pay me $699 for each character encrypted with the Symbol Font Substitution Cypher (tm)(R)(c)(MD)(DDS)!!!

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[JanneM]

Um, no, that is a very premature conclusion.

First, they will have to show that this code is their property; as others have mentioned, both Linux and SCO Unix contain BSD code - which is perfectly legal to copy.

Second, if the code is stuff from IBM/Sequent, they will need to show that IBM did not in fact have the right to give the code away to Linux. This will not be determined until the lawsuit is settled (and looks unlikely to go in SCO:s favour considering the side agreements that explicitly give IBM permission to do whatever they want with their code).

And don't forget that in the case that IBM loses that suit, it becomes a matter between SCO and IBM only. That code IP is owned by IBM, not SCO, no matter what, and Linux users are free to continue using it. The only one damaged by that would be IBM, as they would be found for breach of contract.

Oh, and the 110/2000/890000/dozens/whatever number sco is flinging around at the moment is pretty much immaterial. They haven't exactly been paragons of accuracy in this affair so far.

Again, to reiterate, the whole "illegaly copied code" is, so far, just smoke and mirrors. There is no lawsuit alleging any copyright infringement. There is only a lawsuit alleging that IBM violated an agreement not to share some of their IP with third parties.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[jandrese]

You know, you'd might want to start updating your resume because SCO excecs have been dumping their stock, which is usually a sign that a company is going down. Its not going to be easy to find another cushy job like that where you can sit in your nice office and astroturf Slashdot.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[letxa2000]

Face it. There is stolen code in Linux. How much and how severe the value of the theft is to be determined but that there was theft is almost certain.

Face it, that has yet to be proven. Even if the screen shots provided are correct, it has yet to be determined who put those comments in each code and when. SCO could have just as easily inserted them in their code at the time because it was easier than developing it themselves. Or perhaps they inserted the code intentionally so that later they could say "See? It's the same." Or maybe SCO contributed the code to their Linux distribution? Or, yes, perhaps someone took it from SCO inappropriately and inserted it in Linux--in which case THAT PERSON (or company) should be SCO's target, not Linux and Linux users worldwide.

A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.

And I'm sure that as soon as SCO acts reasonably and friggin' tells the world what sections of code they have a beef with, that's exactly what will happen regardless of whether SCO's claims are valid or not.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[tuffy]

Face it. There is stolen code in Linux. How much and how severe the value of the theft is to be determined but that there was theft is almost certain.

Stolen? Stolen from where? Showing two identical blocks of code in two different OSes proves nothing. SCO has to prove that it is the rightful copyright holder of that code *and* it has to somehow weasel out of its release of that code in the Linux kernel under the GPL. If that code originated in Linux first, SCO is out of luck. If that code originated from a third party and was taked by both Linux and SCO, SCO is out of luck.

But once we see what code is in question, finding the original, rightful copyright holder is the easy part. And if the holder isn't SCO, SCO is out of luck. That's why SCO has been so afraid to show it in public.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[arth1]

The problem with your reasoning is that the comments weren't stolen from SCO and put into Linux. The comments existed way before SCO and Caldera and "new SCO" -- you'll find the same comments in BSD source from the early 80's, and published on the net. So if anyone stole the code, it wasn't any Linux developers, cause Linux didn't even exist back then.

Now will the REAL copyright holder please stand up?

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[bnenning]

In that way, when the courts inevitably rule that the offending code cannot be used in ANY release and blocks ALL USERS from using ANY recent distributions

Does Darl know you've found his stash?

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[MO!]

Face it. There is stolen code in Linux. How much and how severe the value of the theft is to be determined but that there was theft is almost certain.

Not exactly!

It may show that there is identical code in Linux and Unix, but that in no way "proves" the code was stolen from the latter! The code may have come from BSD, it may have been stolen from Linux and copied into Unix, some of it may be OEM code that was released by a hardware vendor to many platforms with the same comments but slightly different actual code. There is no way possible to determine any of this with what pathetically little has been shown.

Which returns to the point that most here have. If this the all they can show - they've got crap for a case! If they have some "smoking gun" type example, then show it so the matter can be resolved. Using "smoke and mirrors" to extort money from Linux users is NOT an acceptable tactic.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[buffer-overflowed]

Since you probably didn't read some of the comments, as others have pointed out, these exact comments (and even some source) are in the public domained Unix 7 code, as well as old BSD code (BSD being absolutely in the clear from the settlement). So, this is in no way an example of infringment. Hell code I've wrote w/o ever seeing any of these is similarly constructed and commented.

BSD Comments (malloc), 1986:
/*
* Allocate 'size' units from the given map. Return the base of the
* allocated space. In a map, the addresses are increasing and the
* list is terminated by a 0 size.
*
* Algorithm is first-fit.
*/

SGI Comments, 1992 - Present:
/*
* Allocate 'size' units from the given map.
* Return the base of the allocated space.
* In a map, the addresses are increasing and the
* list is terminated by a 0 size.
* Algorithm is first-fit.
*/

Unix 7 (Public Domain) 1979:
/*
* Allocate 'size' units from the given
* map. Return the base of the allocated
* space.
* In a map, the addresses are increasing and the
* list is terminated by a 0 size.
* The core map unit is 64 bytes; the swap map unit
* is 512 bytes.
* Algorithm is first-fit.
*/

Wow, stunning proof, absolutely stunning that public domain source and comments would get used and modified.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Atzanteol]

I am facing the fact that the exmple they showed didn't prove anything. Have you accepted that yet?

Face it: SCO has not *proved* a damned thing yet. Would you base your IT funding on unproven claims from SCO? If so, I have some code your work is infringing upon. No really, trust me. Would I make outrageous claims? You owe me big time. Theif.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[cmdr_beeftaco]

Are you claiming that Linux is just a parody of Unix?

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[schon]

Of course stealing comments is IP infringement.

Not according to the judge in the BSD case. He ruled that comments were not part of the source code.

The damages would likely be less if the value of the IP is less but it is out and out theft nonetheless.

Actually, as SCO refuses to disclose the alleged infringing code, the damages will be zero, as SCO is demonstrating that any infringing code is worthless. (If it wasn't worthless, SCO would do everything possible to get it removed from the kernel.)

SCO has made their point very well with the identical comments.

Considering that SCO hasn't made any alleged infringing code (with or without comments) publically available, there has been _NO_ point made at all.

Only the most blind advocate would suspect that somebody wrote new code in a black box and then stole comments that coincidentally happened to match correctly.

The fact that independant people who have signed NDAs, and are given two snippets of code, the origin of which they have no knowledge of, say "the comments are the same" really proves nothing...

There is stolen code in Linux.

Please provide proof of that statement. So far, there has been NO PROOF . At all. Until there is, it's a really large leap to say that SCO is 100% right.

A reasonable advocate would be working on a method to right now to find coders who have NEVER seen either the SCO code, the licensed IBM code or the stolen Linux code and begin a process of writing true black-box replacements.

No, a reasonable advocate would ask SCO for a detailed listing of all of the alleged infringing code. That's been done. SCO has refused.

It's impossible to 'write true black-box replacements' when nobody knows what to replace.

when the courts inevitably rule that the offending code cannot be used in ANY release

Why would a court rule that? SCO has not provided any proof, they continue to distribute any alleged infringing code themselves under the GPL.

Please take your troll somewhere else.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Anonymous Coward]

> 7th Edition UNIX is NOT Public Domain.

Actually, it is:
http://linux.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/1595/

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[deadcasuals]

Congratulations. You are now a criminal under the DMCA for breaking SCO's encryption algorithm!

g00r00?

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Stephen Samuel]

And you really think that every user of Linux, every vendor and every company should bet that all 890,000+ lines of code come from 1979 or earlier? Do you really think UNIX Version 7 in 1979 had a NUMA implementation?

I'd put it the other way 'round:
Out of almost a million lines of 'stolen' code, the best example that they can come up with is something in the public domain???

Between that and their laughable argument for why the GPL is invalid, I'm still expecting them to be quashed in court. In fact, my question is whether or not Boyes is going to get censured for filing a 'frivolous and vexatious' case.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's not.

The article says Caldera released V7 under the BSD license. That makes it free software but not public domain.

At any rate, it *does* mean that SCO's claims are groubdless.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[arth1]

I wrote:

Now will the REAL copyright holder please stand up?

On further investigation, it appears the author is none other than Ken Thompson. See V5/usr/sys/ken/malloc.c.html for further details.

Of course, Ken might have lifted this from even earlier sources.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[FatRatBastard]

And you really think that every user of Linux, every vendor and every company should bet that all 890,000+ lines of code come from 1979 or earlier? Do you really think UNIX Version 7 in 1979 had a NUMA implementation?

And has SysV or any version of UnixWare / OpenUnix had a NUMA implementation? As far as I know the answer to that question is a big, fat *no*. This seems to be the crux of the SCO headfake: It isnt' SCO code to begin with. Apparently, most (all?) of the code in question is IBM's (by SCO's own admission). If IBM submitted it to the Linux kernel it isn't exactly "stolen" since its hard to steal something that was given to you.

Of course, SCO doesn't frame it in those terms. They *may* have licensing rights over certain code assuming that a) the code in questions is deemed by a court to be derivitive of SysV code and b) the licence IBM and AT&T signed governing the SysV code is binding (in the way SCO claims it is), but the NUMA, RCP, etc. implementations are most certainly not their code.

*If* there actual SysV code found in Linux (that is copyrighted SCO/AT&T/Whoever) in Linux then they still have a bunch of problems. 1st being they seem to have released all the old legacy stuff under a BSD license, not to mention the whole AT&T vs. BSD which pretty much kills any of their claims.

To sum up: if its old code chance are SCO has no claim to it due to the AT&T case and the fact they BSD'ed a lot of stuff. If its new code chances are its not SCOs to begin with.

Re:Translation of "symbol" section:

[Alsee]

Show me a case where you are allowed to keep stolen goods

Ah. You're apparently one of those people that thinks information is property and has absoutely no understanding of the LEGAL difference between copyright infringment and theft. Copyright infringement does not create any sort of "stolen goods" that need to be returned to the owner. The copyright holder is compensated with damages from the person who committed infringment, end of story.

Of course I expect you to go on a rant about how I'm "wrong", but I suggest you go argue with the US Supreme court:

"the rights of a copyright holder are `different' from the rights of owners of other kinds of property"

"the copyright holder owns only a bundle of intangible rights which can be infringed, but not stolen or converted"

"It follows that interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: 'Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner,' that is, anyone who trespasses into his exclusive domain by using or authorizing the use of the copyrighted work in one of the five ways set forth in the statute, 'is an infringer of the copyright.'"

The US supreme court states that you CANNOT carry over "theft" concepts to a copyright infringement case. The US supreme court specificly specificly rejected the claim that infringing copies "involved stolen goods". See Dowling vs. United States.

-

Location in Sys 7

[Anonymous Coward]

See Sys 7 1979 location

Re:Location in Sys 7

[albalbo]

Both snippets relate to the first function in that file - malloc(). It's a simple malloc implementation.

The second Heise picture is the body of the function, pretty much. There is now an SMP spinlock in there, and what appears to be some assertion on the size of the memory area (some kind of bigmem check?). Also, the for loop is initialised with a function, which is probably also something memory related, again possibly bigmem related.

So, it relates to the areas SCO said it did. I doubt very much they can claim the code was copied from SysV wholesale. I would be surprised they could even claim that the three changed lines from the ancient Unix are not obvious - e.g., for it to work in SMP you basically need a lock. Although, it would be surprising for the locking mechanism to be identical - so they perhaps have some point here. But, the majority of the function cannot be claimed as copied, surely....

I'm not the only one who noticed this...

[stere0]

The Gentoo People and an AC the previous SCO thread beat me to it. There's a very interesting discussion over at LWN, in which Bruce Perens points out that Caldera has put that code under a free licence.

Re:I'm not the only one who noticed this...

[gotan]

There's also a very informative lkml thread about this and it's already been removed from the source tree, but apparently not because of copyright issues but because it was just "ugly as hell".

Re:I'm not the only one who noticed this...

[LordKaT]

If it was so goddam ugly, how did it get in in the first place?

Well, let's think outside of your trolling existance, shall we? It could've very well been a "first phase" implimentation. That is, it was needed, somone donated it, and it worked. It didn't work well, and it sucked up memory, but everything else either didn't work, broke something, or nobody else offered a solution at the time. So, it was implimented.

Upon implimentation, somone, down the road, said to themselves "hey man, what the fuck is going on here? WHY are we allocating resources that never get used?" and decided to mention it to the public, as well as offer a solution.

In fact, that's exactly how the Linux kernel has grown. There have been several implimentations of various things. They start off as "just working," and move on up to better implimentations as people notice different things.

Also, the function in question is a utility - not many people pay attention to them. Not only that, but it was not used much outside of a few functions. Considering that kernel hackers like to work on the sexiest things, as well as the fact that there are over a million lines of code in the kernel, would lead to this little bit being overlooked quite easily.

Then, as I said, one day, someone, somewhere, came along and said "you know what, Linus? there's a better way to do this ..."

And, the cycle continues.

--LordKaT

Re:I'm not the only one who noticed this...

[Kalak]

IIRC, Christoph Hellwig mentioned something about SCO likely having code that wouldn't survive review on lkml. Seems that it didn't.

In the ia64 directory?

[mgessner]

Am I incorrect in understanding that this is for 64-bit implementations of linux?

If so, how can SCO demand that we give them money for code that's distributed but that 99% of linux users ARE NOT USING?

Re:In the ia64 directory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chewbacca uses an x86 32 bit computer. Chewbacca buys software license for a ia64 computer.

IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!

This..

[Nick Fury]

Still doesn't prove shit for SCO's claim other than digital cameras are getting smaller and easier to hide.

Kernel mailing list comment

[Gaetano]

This from the kernel mailing list

http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf

January 23, 2002 Dear UNIX? enthusiasts, Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems: 32-bit 32V UNIX 16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

-Tupshin

Re:Kernel mailing list comment

[chill]

You are missing something obvious.

Caldera granted rights to what WAS 16-bit and 32-bit code plus DERIVATIVES. The license wasn't a restriction as to what processor it could be run on.

Code in picture 2 doesn't even compile

[*igor*]

if (size == 0)
return) ((ulong_t NULL);

What is this, amateur night?

Re:Code in picture 2 doesn't even compile

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to use the sco switch:

gcc -o -scoRuLEz ate_utils.c ate_utils.o

Re:Code in picture 2 doesn't even compile

[PiGuy]

Here's the actual kernel code:

if (size == 0)
return((ulong_t) NULL);

Now, where'd that misteak come from?

Re:Code in picture 2 doesn't even compile

[lcde]

So it looks like someone in SCO hand typed all the linux code again to the presentation, does this mean they violated their own Copyright and owe themselves $699?

babelfished

[Empiric]

Here's a semi-readable, slightly-cleaned babelfish translation... it'd be great if somebody who can actually speak German could post a better one...


The fight for the legal standard of Linux develops more and more to the show piece: Still two weeks ago ago on the Linuxworld had itself boss Mathew Szulik as the rescuer of the free world explained and all Linux trailers to the fight against the chains of the commercial software industry called. Now geriert itself its opponent Darl McBride of SCO still more martialischer: a James bond in the struggle with dark power -- the open SOURCE movement.

SCO executive committee Darl McBride used two full hours for the prelude of the SCO forum, in order to represent the legal position of its company. With pictures and title music from James bond films the manager sought itself to join in the faithful ones of the former cult company from Santa Cruz for fight for property. The SCO Group leads a law case with IBM because of alleged copyright infringements and abuse of SCOs protected Unix program code in Linux. Star lawyer David Boies, which attained celebrity as a complaint representative of the US government against Microsoft, represents SCO IBM over 1500 Linux Grossanwender printing reminder approximately from SCO kept and was requested to pay royalties.

Supported of its vice-president Chris Sontag showed McBride of examples from the code of the Linux Kernelversionen 2,5 and 2,6, which are to prove that program sections were transferred invariably from Unix -- an example shown by SCO to code comments in the picture left ( version increased ). Identical typing errors in the comments as well as unusual ways of writing would have left traitorous traces, to stated Sontag. Around this to prove McBride a team for pattern recognition had angeheuert, around ten thousands from program lines to through forests. The few code sequences shown apart from the comments were made to a large extent illegible, alleged, in order to protect SCOs author-genuine. They would stand however representing for thousands of program lines, for stressed Sontag. From several persons or groups at different times parts were transferred illegaly to Linux and distributed sourceopen at users and developers. At the contentious software it goes besides not around simple or trivial functions, but important operating system characteristics for the fitness with fastidious tasks and in extremely safe operating conditions into enterprises. In addition belong the multi-processor mechanisms NUMA and SMP, which were to be had under Unix Lizenzbedingungen only with expensive hardware in the value of ten thousands from US dollar to.

Approximately 700 crucial code lines of the SMP technology are to have moved from Unix into the Linux releases 2,4 and 2,5. Altogether SCOs testers over 800.000 lines would have found duplicated program text -- an example of SCO shows the picture right ( version increased ). Attorney Mark Heise from the Boies boies-Kanzlei came along for the support of the SCO managers on the podium in read Vegas. It made clear that a GPL license did not protect against the requirement for authority of SCO. The Unix license, which bought SCO 1994 of the original Unix inventor RK & T, guarantees SCO property at Unix system v copyrights and all RKS & t-software and Sublizenzrechten. Originally the license agreement defined by RK & t-lawyers, which changed over by purchase to SCO, is clear in addition regarding the range and consequence of the license, stressed the lawyer. Afterwards the license grants the "right the software products to the licensee (for example IBM) to own business purposes to use internally", quoted Marks of Heise from the contract text. "modifications and derivatives of results are to be treated like the original software products", continue to be called it there. And they "cannot become used for others or by others".

"Now we know ourselves finally, like Linux in completely short time of a hobby operating system to the platform for ente

I dunno...

[slashhax0r]

It's all Greek To me!!!

Stolen Comments!!!

[burgburgburg]

The fact that SCO refused to show code fragments that they claim are stolen, but felt free to display this purloined comment indicates the root of the problem:

The System V comments have been stolen!!!

Obviously no actual code has been used. But the comments, the key component of the intellectual property that makes up SCO, has been lifted near verbatim and ruthlessly incorporated into Linux. Oh, the injustice.

When will it end?!?

Re:Stolen Comments!!!

[stratjakt]

Actually it makes me more inclined to believe that the two pieces of source were cloned from each other.

Programming languages (C in this case) are fairly orthoganal. It's easy for two people to both come up with the exact same solution in complete isolation, there's often only one "right" way to accomplish something.

But for two to describe the exact same thing in english and come up with word-for-word the exact same result is fishy indeed. Imagine two english students handing in the same essay, word-for-word compared to two comp students handing in the same code with a few changed variable names.

If comments were cut and pasted, I'm assuming code was too. The issue really is who owns the source in the first place, not whether the same code is in both places.

Re:Comments ...

[FrankoBoy]

It's often what Slashdot is all about, anyway ;)

Translation of Kernel Code

[Matrix272]

It actually says:

# Comment by Linus:
# This is not code written by SCO. I swear to god, I wrote it myself.
# It just looks a lot like SCO's code. It just happened that way. There's
# only so many ways to do certain things... I mean, hey, I have to make
# a living too! Where are my lawyers? Well? I don't have any! I have to
# scrap by on a measly salary trying my best to make a difference in the
# world, all the while, companies like IBM and Microsoft release shitty
# software all the time, and nobody seems to care! They're all getting
# butt-raped, and they don't even know it! Well, not anymore! I'm going to
# make the best operating system in the world, and name it after myself!
# M$ and IBM sux0rs!

Exactly!

[Thud457]

Am I incorrect in understanding that this is for 64-bit implementations of linux?

If so, how can SCO demand that we give them money for code that's distributed but that 99% of linux users ARE NOT USING?

This is exactly why they want you to sign your life away by signing a NDA before they will show you the code. They want to use this to bludgeon people into settling BEFORE IT GETS TO COURT . They are not interested in legitmately rectifying the situation.

Re:IANAC

[Anonymous Coward]

The code in question in the Linux kernel is simply a function to allocate a block of space from a pool, looking for the first fit.

If an undergraduate experienced in C were asked to do the same problem the code would look very similar. Hardly a trade secret. Others have commented that this appears in earlier malloc libraries. Perhaps there's the common ancestry, way before SCO existed.

Hardly enterprise class stuff. They had better have much much better examples or their case is toast.

To sum up:

[Vexalith]

To sum up, this code is in 2.4.x but not 2.5.x, was also present in BSD which means its open source based on the case the BSD creators went through in the early 1990s. Have SCO really so poorly researched these examples that this is the best they can show us?

Re:To sum up:

[Vexalith]

It's also in a 1986 Berkley file: http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2.11 BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c

Re:To sum up:

[Vexalith]

Until 1988, BSD Unix required an AT&T license, since each release included AT&T UNIX code. Basically AT&T kept upping the price so BSD released their system under the BSD open source license in 1989. AT&T and BSD went to court in 1992 and it went BSD's way. So anything that appeared in BSD before 1992 is open source under a BSD license even if it came directly from UNIX. Also it can be re-licensed under the GPL because the BSD license allows this.

Re:To sum up:

[Vexalith]

Replying to myself with a link:
http://oasis.dit.upm.es/~jantonio/documento s/opens ource/kirkmck.html

(realization) The code...

[Ayanami Rei]

they list as duplicated is freely available in the SysV-7 releases, which anyone has access to.

It's from an implementation of malloc, and the codes is pretty simple (no reason to deviate).

If this is a shining example, it is a very poor one. It only looks the same because everyone had access to it and no one thought to change it, renaming variables or otherwise.

Ah hah!

[airrage]

It was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick!!!!

Re:I can decipher it!

[Fractal Law]

The thing is that it actually is the Windows Symbol font. I can read Greek (Ancient Greek at least) and while the alphabet used is the Greek one all that somebody did was highlight the text in question and change the font to Symbol, which is what Windows calls its Greek font.

In other words it's English written using the Greek alphabet. Why somebody would do something so silly puzzles me, however.

Yes, that's right, they're claiming malloc()

[raindog2]

Here's the earliest implementation people have found so far, from 1979 (before SCO was "born"):

http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/sys/sys/mal loc.c.html

And here's where it was part of BSD 2.11 circa 1992:

http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2.11 BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c

Oh, how I hope the mainstream tech press "gets" this.

Re:Yes, that's right, they're claiming malloc()

[duplicate-nickname]

1992? In an early post, they found the code in a BSD newsgroup from 1984.

News Posting

Re:Yes, that's right, they're claiming malloc()

[BrynM]

"Oh, how I hope the mainstream tech press 'gets' this."

Even if they don't, I did. Many others here did. Thank you. Thank you very much.

I don't think SCO really knows the history of all of this code. Especially since they are fairly recent to it's ownership. Instead of being silly, they should be hiring guys like you who know this code's history and true origins (sometimes line by line - you guys amaze me) to do a bit of reality checking for them. Then again, I can't think of anyone who would want to work for Darl.

Code from BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that it looks like SCO's snippet, doesn't even belong to them, compare following which is: Copyright 1986 Regents of the University of California

That's BSD

Here's that comment in a 1984 Usenet posting!

[yeremein]

Here or Here

Re:Here's that comment in a 1984 Usenet posting!

[ZZane]

And notice that it's BSD code, which lends credence to the belief that some (if not all) of the "infringing" code is actually BSD code used in both Linux and SCO. I'm not sure of BSD's licensing but wouldn't that mean that SCO is the one breaking the law here?

Who'd actually be surprised to find that SCO is using open source code improperly/illegaly? :)

ah people time to wave bye bye to SCO Group

[linuxislandsucks]

this is code that was contributed by Caldera employees and thus released under full SCO Group knowledge to Linux..

So where is the magical proof that McBride keeps claiming that he has?

I smell a fraud lawsuit against McBride on the basis of both Federal and State BlueSky Laws on the basis on making false factual public statements that investors relied upon to buy SCO Group stock..

and Boise should know better than to perpuate false information about the laws and regs on software copyrights!

still proves nothing...

[The Lynxpro]

My reaction is "so what." I wouldn't be surprised if you saw those same lines in NT. They probably originated in BSD as so many others have stated and will continue to state. If it is true Caldera sent an employee or two to IBM to help *beef up* Linux, then that would be a valid explanation as to why the code is the same. SCO is Caldera and they cannot deny that no matter how many times they change their corporate name. They put the lines in there and they distributed the offending versions of Linux under the GPL. Just because they are no where as successful as RedHat or SuSE gives them no rights to try to weasel out of it now... When will SuSE, Xandros, and Lindows join the RedHat lawsuit against *Caldera*???

Looks like SGIs IP not SCOs

[pstreck]

/* $Id: ate_utils.c,v 1.1 2002/02/28 17:31:25 marcelo Exp $ * * This file is subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public * License. See the file "COPYING" in the main directory of this archive * for more details. * * Copyright (C) 1992 - 1997, 2000-2002 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. */ Copyright SGI.... hrrmm, I wonder what their contract says about derrivitive(i cant spell) works.

Insanity

[Helmholtz]

Of course isn't descrabling the greek phrase a direct violation of the DMCA?

CRAP! Now SCO can sue all the people that have printed, spoken, or otherwise communicated the obscured text!

This whole thing is really getting ridiculous. I wonder how long it will be before the laws that support this kind of nonsense are seriously reworked and/or simply gotten rid of.

Re:I can decipher it!

[Arker]

I can't read greek very well, but I do know the greek alphabet. Here is what the obfuscated section of the first picture 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)

00-nought

[Chagatai]

I love this quote:

With pictures and title music from James bond films the manager sought itself to join in the faithful ones of the former cult company from Santa Cruz for fight for property.

Sorry, but Darl is no 007. If I had to cast him in a James Bond movie he would be something like "henchman #7 who gets shot by his own soldiers and falls off a banister to hang by his neck in front of James Bond." If he were even able to be given a name such as "Odd Job" or "Goldfinger", Darl's name would be "Ass Hat" or something like that.

Re:I can decipher it!

[$rtbl_this]

But that's actually the same thing. It's a little known secret that all foreign languages are really just English spelled/pronounced wrong or encoded in a different character set. It's just one of the things that they don't want you to know.

This code was apparently donated by Caldara (SCO)

[m.dillon]

From the linux-kernel list, the code was apparently donated by Caldara under the BSD license in 2002. Here are the references.

Start of Thread

Conclusion

It's HP's fault this stupid code is in there.

[echo]

Check this out

patch@hp.com according to bitkeeper.

Also, this has been removed in 2.6, mainly because it was a stupid implementation.

Re:It's HP's fault this stupid code is in there.

[6079_Smith]

So to sum it up: SCO sued IBM, because HP comitted a patch copied by SGI from an old Bell Labs Unix, which was released under a BSD license by SCO. Seems like Sun are the only ones not involved. That's probably the reason they bought one of those Unix licenses from SCO, just to be part of the picture.

Don't forget spelling...

[DaHat]

Most know that... one must also remember to make sure the spelling is correct, teachers often get wise when two students make the same spelling mistake

Re:Don't forget spelling...

[Moofie]

What about those of us who don't make spelling mistkaes?

Re:Don't forget spelling...

[Sique]

Interestingly though "mistkaes" means something like dung cheese in German ;)

Re:Don't forget spelling...

[Moofie]

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there exists a "dung cheese" in German cuisine, but I am repulsed.

Thanks for sharing. : )

Re:I can decipher it!

[wwest4]

maybe it's just bad corporate humor - powerpoint slides meant for exec types. the author anticipated:

"what does that C code mean"

"it's all greek to me"

har, har.

Re:So this is what they're pitching a fit about?

[gowen]

I'll wager that code is also in BSD

You are correct. It was in the PDP11 architecture BSD UNIX as long ago as v2.11

LWN Overview

[saspengiun]

Check out the history good overview History

Why is everyone fixated on the kernel source code?

[czei]

The actual source code in question isn't of primary importance at this point since the main SCO complaint is against IBM, and IBM's source code is in the Linux source tree because they donated it. Its public knowledge that IBM donated code to Linux, and SCO is just showing the code to selected neophytes for shock value. "SCO showed me source code from Linux and System V, and THEY WERE THE SAME! I'm shocked! IBM must be guilty".

SCO may eventually make other claims that all of Linux is their stolen property, but for the time being the focus should be on IBM, and in that case looking at the code does nothing but provide FUD fodder for clueless news outlets. The headlines will read "Industry analyst says lines of code are the same, SCO up 3 points".

The real issue here is this is a licensing dispute between two software companies, and it says nothing of value about the open source development process or Linux. Its in SCO's interest to bring these broader issues into the picture in order to put pressure on IBM to settle, but DON'T TAKE THE BAIT!

It is a wonderful day, but don't celebrate yet

[EmagGeek]

It is so great that everyone here in the /. community is so on top of this. It's great that so many of you know where to look to find the true origins of the "stolen" code, that by today's evidence, is obviously not stolen.

However, this is not yet the time to celebrate. SCO is claiming 829,000 lines of code was "stolen" from SMP code alone. Of course this is probably ridiculous, but a screen shot of some comments from the late 70's only shows that those particular comments were not stolen.

There is still a lot of work to do. Mr. McBride is creating so much work because for each claim of copyright, the onus is going to be on the linux community to find the origins and prove the allegations wrong. SCO is only going to present SCO code that was supposedly 'written' before the linux code. Their entire offense is going to rest solely upon the fact that they have a plaintext file with an earlier date than the linux kernel's corresponding code file.

The work is going to be on our backs to locate even older code that SCO's predecessors used to write SYS V. I would raise the bar as well and go so far as to attempt to show that SCO's code was itself misappropriated.

We are just now starting to see how much work we have in front of us, and believe me, that mountain of work is only going to get larger. But, as with the development of linux itself, there are millions of developers across the globe that will be able to find evidence to refute each and every one of their fraudulent and baseless claims.

Re:It is a wonderful day, but don't celebrate yet

[pjrc]

It is so great that everyone here in the /. community is so on top of this.

Some time ago, moderator points were scarce and usually fewer than 10 coments would end up at +5. Today, this popular article has already more than 50 comments moderated to +5, and quite frankly most of them are hardly "on top of this". Yes, a few are, but most are not.

One mentions checking the linux CVS repository history, yet the Linus has never used CVS and only revently started using bitkeeper.

Many posts stupidly suggest that this questionable code could have originated within linux and been copied by SCO. How stupid is that, when the code is from 1979 or possibly earlier?

Many others point out that because it appeared in Berkeley BSD, it must be legit... yet the version of BSD it appears in was long before the settlement with AT&T/USL, and before the effort to rewrite all of AT&T's code.

Now a few +5 posts (a small minority) insightfully point out that this code is within the two ancient unix sources that Caldera released with a BSD-style license within the last two years.

But denying that the ancient unix is not the source, or incredibly that it could have originated in linux between 1991 to present and been copied by SCO into the code from teh 70's and 80's is just downright stupid.

A moderation system where several such comments end up at "+5 insightful", thereby dilluting attention from the minority of +5 comments with good informtation is a vbery broken moderation system indeed.

Hardly what I'd call "everyone here in the /. community is so on top of this". Replace "everyone" with "a few needles in the haystack of bogus +5 comments" and I'd agree.

Re:It is a wonderful day, but don't celebrate yet

[fishbowl]

"A moderation system where several such comments end up at "+5 insightful", thereby dilluting attention from the minority of +5 comments with good informtation is a vbery broken moderation system indeed. "

I'd change it to not cap the limit of moderation totals, certainly way higher than just "+5"...
And then for the filter, I'd provide a logrithmic scale to filter the messages.

It's from the BSD and PDP11 sources

[Jerry]

http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2.11 BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c

/*
* Copyright (c) 1986 Regents of the University of California.
* All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement
* specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
*
* @(#)subr_rmap.c 1.2 (2.11BSD GTE) 12/24/92
*/

#include "param.h"
#include "systm.h"
#include "map.h"
#include "vm.h" /*
* Resource map handling routines.
*
* A resource map is an array of structures each of which describes a
* segment of the address space of an available resource. The segments
* are described by their base address and length, and sorted in address
* order. Each resource map has a fixed maximum number of segments
* allowed. Resources are allocated by taking part or all of one of the
* segments of the map.
*
* Returning of resources will require another segment if the returned
* resources are not adjacent in the address space to an existing segment.
* If the return of a segment would require a slot which is not available,
* then one of the resource map segments is discarded after a warning is
* printed.
*
* Returning of resources may also cause the map to collapse by coalescing
* two existing segments and the returned space into a single segment. In
* this case the resource map is made smaller by copying together to fill
* the resultant gap.
*
* N.B.: the current implementation uses a dense array and does not admit
* the value ``0'' as a legal address or size, since that is used as a
* delimiter.
*/
/*
* Allocate 'size' units from the given map. Return the base of the
* allocated space. In a map, the addresses are increasing and the
* list is terminated by a 0 size.
*
* Algorithm is first-fit.
*/
memaddr
malloc(mp, size)
struct map *mp;
register size_t size;
{
register struct mapent *bp, *ep;
memaddr addr;
int retry;

if (!size)
panic("malloc: size = 0"); /*
* Search for a piece of the resource map which has enough
* free space to accomodate the request.
*/
retry = 0;

.....

Which means that SCO is using BSD/PDP11 code. This is also part of the code they called "Ancient Unix", because it was old and obsolete, and posted it on the web. Initially they wanted a $100 "license" fee to download the code, but the number of takers were so few that SCO opened it up to free access. We're they hoping someone might copy some of the code into the Linux kernel? Some might suggest that this was their plan all along, but a lot of the Sys V code would require a "glue", as former SCO employee Christoph Hellwig put it, in order for the SCO code to work in Linux. That kludge would not pass lkrnl checking.

"Leaked"? Careful! This might be a set-up by SCO!!

[rump_carrot]

Call me paranoid....but this might be a trick by SCO to probe the defences of the Open Source community, by having us do their historical code research for them, gratis.

What do I mean? An example.

I used to be a magician - a classic trick in the magicians arsenal is called the "sucker trick"

In the sucker trick one does a seemingly stupid trick. As people start to think they have figured it out, the bright (and loud) ones start yelling how they think it works. Then, PRESTO, the real trick is revealed!

IF you do it right, people are amazed and impressed, and more importantly, you have identified the hecklers in the audience, who often remain quiet the rest of the show out of embarrassment.

I know this sounds paranoid, and you might think ol' Darl is no magician, but he has conjured ~ 20X increase in SCO "worth", from an essentially worthless company.

Just a thought.

OT, but SCO related

[OMG]

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030819/latu060_1.html
reads:

The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), the owner of the UNIX(R) operating system, today announced the appointment of Gregory Blepp as vice president of SCOsource. Blepp will report to Chris Sontag, the senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource, the division of SCO tasked with protecting and licensing the company's UNIX intellectual property.

Blepp, a former VP of International Business at SuSE, brings to SCO a wealth of experience in marketing and business management from time at Network Associates and Computer Associates. Blepp's appointment is taking place at SCOForum in Las Vegas this week where he is being introduced to SCO partners and resellers.

"We're pleased to have Gregory Blepp join SCO to assist in our efforts around SCOsource in Europe," said Chris Sontag, senior vice president and GM, SCOsource. "We look forward to using Blepp's talents and expertise in assisting the company to properly license SCO's valuable UNIX intellectual property."

Is this world full of insane people ?

Code has been around since at least 1973

[rkww]

The nsys kernel version of malloc has exactly the same implementation, albeit without any comments.

Dennis Ritchie has written So far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of Unix that currently exists in machine-readable form. ... The dates on the transcription are hard to interpret correctly; if my program that interprets the image are correct, the files were last touched on 22 Jan, 1973. ...

Re:Code has been around since at least 1973

[chefmonkey]

Giving up my mod points to post on this thread...

As much as I'd love to see SCO go down in flames over this issue, I think you're missing some important facts.

So, the code is old. That doesn't mean it's public domain. And who wrote it? According to what you cite, Dennis Ritchie. In 1973, Ritchie was working for Bell Labs, developing their Unix system. Yes, Bell Labs, part of AT&T. You know, SysV and all that? The copyrights to that code have subsequently been sold, and are currently held by... The SCO Group.

Whoops.

Prior to January 1, 1978, the copyright term was 28 years. At the end of the 28th year, the copyright period could be renewed for an optional period of 28 years, later extended to 47 years.

1973 is 30 years ago. If the copyright on the code has been properly maintained, that would mean that SCO owns it potentially until January of 2048. If not, the code passed into the public domain back in 2001.

Yes, perhaps it's been infringed on in other places (n.b., however, that Irix and BSD through 4.4 were licencees of the original code, and the the PDP-11 was Dennis Ritchie's development platform at Bell Labs), but this is copyright, not trademark law. Other infringements don't trigger a free-for-all.

This one will take some sorting out. It's certainly not as cut-and-dried as SCO is pretending it to be, but it's hardly clear that we (the Linux crowd) are as correct as we believe, either.

Re:Code has been around since at least 1973

[Darth]

well, if the code has remained unchanged since January of '73, then the same code is in versions 2, 3 and 4 of Unix.

AT&T gave the sources to Unix away free to academic institutions sometime around 1974.
Additionally, Caldera made some of the sources available under a BSD style license in Jan. 2002.

There is also the possibility that some of the "infringing" code comes from the from scratch UNIX rewrite by Tanenbaum (minix released in 1986) that was the basis of Linux. (legally, minix can be used as if it were public domain)

They might hold a copyright on that code. However, prior owners of that copyright gave that code away for free.

They are going to have a lot of fun trying to show that really ancient pieces of code like that didnt come from sources that were freely released by prior owners of the code.

Re:Code has been around since at least 1973

[Darth]

Yes, they did. And they were selling the same code to institutions for $50,000 at the same time, so it certainly wasn't a release into public domain. Stop and think about it; this is copyright, not a trade secret. Just giving someone the source doesn't provide them license to do what they want. The analog would be Bloomsbury Publishing giving free copies of the newest Harry Potter book to schools. Would doing so cause them to surrender their copyright to that work?

well, that exact piece of code was also published in a book with no restrictions on its use. (publication of the book was approved by SCO, who held the copyright on it at the time)

It was also published in Kernighan and Ritchie's C programming book without restriction when AT&T owned the code.

Which is basically the point I was trying to make: untangling this whole mess is going to be very difficult. And, as much as I want SCO to be absolutely, 100% wrong across the board, I'm not so cocksure as to go off claiming that it's the case before some of this untangling has actually been pursued.

I dont think untangling the mess will be difficult. I think SCO proving a case will be insanely difficult. The reason we know so much about arbitrary lines of code is because there's tons of documentation and history for it all. It is very easy for this history to destroy SCO's claims and they are the ones who have to do the exhaustive research to prove those claims.

What I'm particularly wary of is the scads of ignorant comments along the lines of, "Look! The code is from before 1978 (or 1973)! SCO didn't even exist! It must not be theirs!" Intellectual property can be bought and sold. The logic of that statement is a sound as claming that there's no way I could possibly own my house because it was built before I was born.

i agree that the age of the code relative to SCO as a company has no bearing on the ownership of the code. I also agree that anyone making that statement is foolish.

It's hard to not be very optimistic about the SCO case, though. The only code sample they are claiming copyright infringement on that has made it to public scrutiny, they dont even have a copyright on. Their assertions relative to the case border on the absurd. The claims made by their legal representation are clearly contradicted by the text of the laws they are citing to make their claims. And they chose to target a company that spends more on break room coffee than SCO has in total assets.

It's hard not to be optimistic.

Slashdot is working

[mnmn]

Slashdot is an online machinery that is geared towards the benefit of the free software community. Throw some challenges to the free software community at slashdot and watch thousands of brilliant minds load-balanced working like a huge beowulf processing information online (a bit like SETI) to achieve the commonly understood goal; in this case to defend Linux.

If you want millions of man-hours with full motivation and some of the best skill to work for you for free, go to slashdot provided the task is enormously beneficial to the free software community. No corporation can spend any amount of capital or hire any number of people to match the productivity of geeks running on fuel that is pizza and beer to change the world.

Bravo.

Next time, write it in Perl

[Raster Burn]

If these functions were implemented in Perl, they would be guaranteed to look different than the System V!

I'm pissed

[lspd]

Come on now. I took the idea of comparing sources using MD5 hashes that Michael Chaney and Rick Bradley came up with, tweaked it a bit, compared Sys3 with 2.4.21 and posted this match on /. a while back.

When it was posted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List they gave me a little shout-out. If when SCO says "a team of code comparison experts" they actually mean some guy on slashdot...well...they could at least give me a mention. Not like I really care about getting a proper "* Thanks LSPD" in the SCO Legal Case Changelog, but give me a break.

Bastards...

*scratches head*

[Platinum Dragon]

So let me get this straight.

A patch was submitted by someone from HP, containing a Silicon Graphics, Inc. copyright line, along with at least one chunk of code that is nearly identical to several early BSDs, as part of an SMP implementation, that SCO is claiming IBM donated to the Linux kernel in violation of a contract?

What. The. Fuck. I don't even want to try and figure out the web of licences, contracts, and original sources for this code. Based on other comments, it looks like a basic (crappy) implementation of memory allocation. On top of it all, whoever at SCO prepared the PowerPoint presentation managed to mistype the supposed SysV code.

Several scattered thoughts come to mind, among them "chutzpah", "pump and dump", and "someone's going to jail when this is all over."

Re:*scratches head*

[Angst Badger]

I don't even want to try and figure out the web of licences, contracts, and original sources for this code.

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting the impression that it's corporate coders working for proprietary software companies whose coding practices are sloppy and reckless about intellectual property, and not us long-haired hippie commie free software freaks?

You see!

[nedwidek]

You see! This is why they didn't show their evidence! You all have gone and poked holes in it. Shame on you, you're going to be responsible for the death of a corporation!

Important note for the sarcasm impared: yes, the above is sarcasm.

SCO are lazy, stupid bastards

[heironymouscoward]

And so they think that everyone else is too. It's the classic syndrome called "projection".

The SystemV code shown is mroe recent than the Linux code, with added comments. No-one, ever, removes comments when copying code.

All their presentation shows is that the two functions have a shared pedigree, and this code is so old that the pedigree can be found in at least two books, and multiple versions of Unix.

SCO are lying, thieving, scurilous rumour mongers and sadly getting much too much attention.

Which makes me think: could the whole thing be simply intended to distract our attention from something else happening...? It is a classic ploy.

Translation of the article

[reignbow]

The battle for the legality of Linux is becoming increasingly melodramatic: Two weeks ago, RedHat CEO Mathew Szulik declared himself Saviour of the Free World, and called for all Linux-Supporters to join the battle for freedom from the software industry. His opponent darl McBride from SCO strikes an even more martialic pose: a James Bond fighting against the forces of Darkness -- incarnated in the Open Source Movement.

McBride spent no less than two hours at the beginnign of the SCO symposium to clarify his company's legal position. Backed by pictures and music from various Bond flicks, he attempted to rally the supporters of the formerly cult company from Santa Cruz to his fight for the Good Cause. The SCO Group has started a legal battle against IBM for alleged copyright violations and misuse of SCO-owned UNIX code in Linux. Star attorney David Boies, famous for fielding the US anti-trust effort against Microsoft, represents SCO against IBM. More than 1500 major Linux-using companies have received admonitions to pay licensing fees from SCO.

With Vice CEO Chris Sontag as sidekick, McBride offered several examples from Kernel 2.5 and 2.6 that are meant to prove that several program parts were transplanted unmodified from UNIX -- such an example is here. Duplicated typos in the commentary as well as unusual coding style have left traces, says Sontag. To porve this, McBride employed teams for pattern recognition to parse tens of thousands of lines of code. The few sequences of actual code shown besides the commentaries were largely scrambled, supposedly to protect SCO copyright. They were, however, representative for a thousand other just like them, emphasizes Sontag. Multiple developers had illegally transplanted code into Linux and then distributed the source to users and developers. The software in question is nothing trivial, but contains integral operating system functions used for demanding applications and extremely secure environments in companies. Among them are the multiprocessor technologies NUMA and SMP, which under UNIX licensing cost 10,000$ or more.

Rouhgly 700 lines of code for the SMP technology are supposed to have gone into Kernel versions 2.4 and 2.5. All in all, SCO claims to have found no less than 800.000 lines of duplicated code -- one example is shown here. Attorney Mark Heise from Boies' law firm joined the SCO chiefs on the podium in Las Vegas. He emphasized that the GPL did not offer protection against copyright claims from SCO. The Unix license that SCO bought from AT&T in 1994 guarantees SCO ownership of System V copyright and all AT&T software and sublicense rights. The license agreement, originally drawn up by AT&T lawyers, which has since gone over to SCO, is unequivocal concerning scope, Heise affirmed. Accordingly, the license gives the licensee (e.g. IBM) the right to use the software internally for commercial purposes. Modifications and derivatives are subject to the license just like the original. They cannot be used for or by third parties.

"Now we finally know how Linux has matured from hobby OS to IT-company platform," Sontag jibes. "If something sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't," topped McBride. Evolved technology simply cannot be had for free. "Free Software -- not our thing." UNXIX comprises 20 years of development work: Based on it, SCO wants to make money for another 20 years. McBride appealed for support from partners and developers from the UNIX community, otherwise, "the times for good business might soon be over." GPL and Open Source destroy legal business models -- compensations and a legal business model for the future are therefore necessary. Heise seconded: That SCO once distributed its code as Linux distributor, did not mean that Linux users where protected from all demands because of the GPL. Copyright for code can only be obtained by a written contract wit

Re:Why is everyone fixated on the kernel source co

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Don't forget SCO's Linux licensing program.

The code which SCO showed here does not appear to have been donated by IBM. In the Linux kernel it was marked with an SGI copyright.

The fact that IBM donated code to Linux may (or may not) give SCO a case against IBM. However, since that code was not written by SCO, for SCO to claim that that code gives SCO any IP rights to Linux is very tenuous.

SCO is showing this example of direct copying from Unix to Linux to show that SCO has IP rights to Linux, thus justifying their Linux licensing program.

Mind you, since this code has already been removed from the Linux kernel, it looks like it's not going to help the Linux licensing program much. Of course, SCO claims to have other examples. They're probably worth about as much as this one.

It's got to be infringement.....

[telstar]

After all ... there can't be more than one person that actually comments their code, can there?

HOW DARE THEY ...

[ProfMoriarty]

SCO blatently copying peoples' hard work.

Even the COMMENTS are the same ... have they no shame?

Re:Comments ...

[grendelkhan]

Except that in the 1992 BSD case the Judge ruled the comments didn't count towards copyright violations, just the code. So, by the logic, someone could have taken the code, left in the comments as a guide, and wrote a new implementation, AND,/b> still be free and clear as far as the law was concerned.

Good source for UNIX sourcecode

[Jeremy Erwin]

I googled for the comments, and found that several early UNIXes contain this comment. The source code for a number of variants, clones, and whatnot, are available here Unfortunately, some trees are limited to man pages, which are merely of historical interest.

Well

[autopr0n]

If you read the article, you'd see that that SCO BSD'd all that code just last year. This is something they can't revoke.

Re:Well

[Magic Thread]

It was the original BSD license, though. The one with the GPL-incompatible obnoxious advertising clause. The copyright notice has been changed as well. So there is copyright violation here, though it's doubtful SCO can claim monetary damages from it.

Oops missed the best one:

[Arker]

http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2. 11BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c

Deliberately not making links so as to hopefully not slashdot more servers than necessary. If you want to see it, cut and paste.

BSD 2.11, for the PDP-11, had it. This is very very ancient Unix.

Re:Oops missed the best one:

[quigonn]

The funniest part (for me) is that it's a trivial first-fit algorithm for (in the Unix V6 source code) memory allocation, that has be written and rewritten by really a lot of people and documented in various textbooks (Lions' Commentary, Tanenbaum's book about Minix). Definitely not something SCO could claim "Intellectual Property" for.

Not at all irrelevant

[bstadil]

This is not irrelevant at all.

Think about the RedHat suit, They are suing for damages to their business.

Lying at a public forum knowing this will boost your share price at the expense of the credibility of a competitor is Bad News.

Any jury (remember this is in Federal court not in the Mormon hinterland) will award damages.

No wonder SCO's products suck...

[kwiqsilver]

They're all written in Greek! Greek is a fine language for religious texts and plays about incest, but it's not a programming language. Silly SCO...
Here's what they cleverly hid using a different font:
"As part of the kernel evolution
toward 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)
"
Does breaking their encryption count as my DMCA violation for today?

Analysis by Bruce Perens

[kaip]

Bruce Perens has written an analysis of the code that SCO claims was wrongfully copied into Linux: http://perens.com/Articles/SCOCopiedCode.html

Stealing?

[Steeltoe]

I find it sad to see how many here call sharing code for stealing. Without sharing code, there can be no further progress on computer science. Instead of having ad-hoc solutions, it can evolve into a fully fledged engineering science. But only if people can collaborate on standards and further its progress instead of being busy putting up tool-booths for inventing the inevitable.

You never drive over a bridge proprietary to BigCorporation(R)(TM)(C). You drive over an assembled construction errected by standardized plans, tools and mass. Instead, we have a mad goldrush that sinks the economy through the floor.

Sad.

yep. It's AT&T code, but...

[Stephen Samuel]

OK: so, good news, bad news here.

The bad news is that we have code in Linux that's tracable back to AT&T, and it doesn't seem to be properly attributed.

The good news is that the easy solution to this is to simply properly attribute this code. (it was apparently released by SCO, under a BSD license, which requires attribution). A better solution might be to simply rewrite it from scratch.

Another good news/bad news is that this is very tight and highly functional code. As such it might be rather hard to rewrite without reproducing.. on the other hand, if that is the case, this might be an indication that this code is not properly copyrightable (IANAL, but my understanding is that functional, as opposed to expressive code is not considered copyrightable).

Better yet, can anybody get hold of Thompson and see if he remembers where he got this algorithm from?

That having been said, this is a very small chunck of code, and may have been further purloined from elsewhere. (anybody have a copy of "Knuth" floating around?)

(IANAL, but I sometimes get mistaken for one)

Re:Doesn't affect SCOX stock price at all

[m.dillon]

The price of a stock traded on the NYSE or NASDAQ (not counting over-the-counter (OTC) trading) is determined by the open market. Holding a high percentage of stock in a company does not really have any effect on its price, only on transaction volume. Transaction volume can have an indirect effect on price but the volatility you get from low transaction volume works in both directions. The same low trading volume makes it easier for speculative actions to move the price up or down also makes it fairly difficult for insiders to unload massive amounts of stock all at once, because doing so will kill the price. They are basically playing a game with the speculators in order to try to maintain the price of the stock and yet still be able to slowly sell their own, IMHO.

Also don't forget the shorts. At some point shorts have to buy the stock back, which can boost the price of the stock. I don't think short covering is a big part of the current holding value of SCOX but it does tend to mitigate the downramp a bit when downramps happen.

In short, SCOX is a highly speculative and volatile stock and any simplistic view of cause and effect in the matter is no more accurate then rolling the dice.

Re:Why does IBM take it? Here's why...

[m.dillon]

Part of IBM's countersuit is an indictment of SCO's use of press releases, stated exaggerations and falsehoods in interviews, and so forth. By not engaging in these tactics itself IBM is adding weight to its countersuit. Besides, IBM has all of us to beat the drums for it.

"theft"

[rsilverman]

Face it. There is stolen code in Linux. How much and how severe the
value of the theft is to be determined but that there was theft is almost
certain...

One of the more irritating tactics in the war of misinformation about IP
being waged by organizations like SCO, the RIAA, etc., is the intentional
misuse of language. Things like trying to make "filesharing" a dirty word
in itself, when in fact there is of course nothing more immoral about
copying files than there is about using a photocopier -- it depends on
what you're copying and what you're doing with it.

Another example is the rampant incorrect use of the terms "theft,"
"stealing," etc., intended to make the alleged perpetrators sound like
sordid, common criminals. Copying a file, no matter what the IP issues
surrounding it, is simply not "theft." From Webster's
dictionary:

Theft, n... (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking
and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful
owner of the same; larceny.

Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's
consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property
stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it
must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the
thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.

Copying data does not deprive the owner of the original of that data. It
has not been removed, and he still has access to it and use of it. There
might be copyright infringement, and there might not be, but it is
not theft.

Even Better!

[Arker]

Hate to keep adding posts but it has taken some time to trace this thing. Earliest match yet I found isn't perfect, but in context it's obvious that the exact match in V6 is just the result of some small editing of this earlier version.
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ken/m alloc.c.html

This is 30 year old code people. Is it even still covered by copyright at all?

Anyone found earlier versions to check? I wouldn't be surprised if this bit didn't originate even earlier.

Legal summary of the SCO situation

[tstoneman]

Let's not get confused with what is going on in the SCO situation. I had my IP lawyer friend explain to me exactly what is going on. I am not a lawyer, so take everything that I have written down with a grain of salt, and I may even have the issues confused, so don't sue me.

1) SCO is suing IBM for trade secret misappropriation. They are saying that IBM gave away some secrets and it caused them damages. This doesn't really affect Linux.
2) Copyright infringement. They say that Linux contains millions of lines of code that infringes SCO's copyright. This is the reason why they are charging Linux users a license. You can only infringe copyrights if you are given a license by the holder of the copyright. Code comments *are* copyright-able and can be considered trade secrets (but you cannot do both). You cannot patent code comments, but having infringing code copied into the Linux code could be considered copyright infringement. Although if it were only code comments, the claims for damages may be very negligible.

In order for anti-SCO-pro-Linux forces to win, they need to either:
1) prove that SCO doesn't own the copyright to what it says it owns. Right now, there is a presumption that SCO does own the copyright to what it says it owes, it is up to the anti-SCO forces to prove otherwise. I think all the comparisons to UNIX 7 code, if it really was public domain that preceded SCO's claims, could be a good strategy.

2) prove that SCO has waived their claims to copyright infringement. Some people are saying that SCO waived their rights by publishing their own version of Linux, but this is dubious, since they claim someone else infringed their copyrights and placed the code there.

To all Washington DC Slashdotters:

SCO must have disclosed code to the Library of Congress when it registered their copyright to the UNIX code. Presumably they registered infringed code otherwise it would be a pointless on their part. Something must be available there, and it will give a better clue as to what code they say has been infringed. Maybe someone can actually go down there, do some research and publish or point out what that code actually is.

Re:Legal summary of the SCO situation

[frkiii]

Copyright infringement is NOT part of their suit against IBM. The only place where SCO has alledged this, is in their statements to the press, in the form of "IP", etc. To the best of my knowledge, they have not filed a copyright infringement case against ANYONE. I have read SCO's original and amended suits against IBM, it is simply a contractual suit, generally breach of contract, and disclosing "trade secrets". Which is really funny, because they specifically name NUMA, JFS and SMP in their lawsuit, refering to what IBM contributed to Linux. And that is funny, because SCO does not own or "control" that software at all. Most if it is copyrighted by IBM or by company that IBM bought (Sequent) or others, but NOT SCO. SCO's entire case, based on their filed amended complaint, hinges on the court ruling that NUMA, JFS and SMP are "derivative workds" of Unix System V. But that is very highly unlikely, in my opinion. Regards, Fredrick

Re:parentheses... confusing....

[frkiii]

Yeah, the ")" after "return" is invalid C syntax.

Compiler would hack up a hair ball.

And the "((" before "ulong_t NULL)" is also invalid syntax.

I am not familiar with that particular piece of code, but it appears that a cast is being made to case "NULL" as a "ulong_t" datatype, but not sure, it might "more correctly" look like this:

return (ulong_t) NULL; or

return ((ulong) NULL);

Regards,

Fredrick

Look what I found !!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been discovered that the code was submitted in linux by HP on March 9, 2002. The author was patch@hp.com

http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.5/diffs/Bit Ke eper/deleted/.del-ate_utils.c~f3dbb032c5361f93@1.1 ?nav=hist/BitKeeper/deleted/.del-ate_utils.c~f3dbb 032c5361f93

So to sum it up:

SCO sued IBM, because HP comitted a patch copied by SGI from an old BELL LABS (otherwise known as AT&T) Unix, which was released under a BSD license by SCO (previously known as CALDERA) after aquiring the copyrights from NOVELL with the help of funding from MICROSOFT and SUN and in turn got counter-sued by IBM,SUSE and REDHAT.

Anyone else ?
oh .. what was that one fortune 500 company which paid up to SCO ?

a little allegory

[dh003i]

SCO: You tresspassed on my property

YOU: Huh? What? Where's your property?

SCO: I can't tell you that, because telling you that would allow you to tresspass on my property again.

YOU: Huh? How the fuck am I supposed to avoid tresspassing on your property if you won't tell me where it is.

SCO: That's your problem.

YOU: Can you show me some evidence that proves I tresspassed on your property?

SCO: No, that would violate our property rights!

YOU: Can you show me how not to tresspass on your property?

SCO: No, that would violate our property rights. Now, we're going to sue you for tresspassing!

SCO released that code under BSD license!

[nathanh]

This is amusing. The code in question was released by SCO under the BSD license, last year, before McBride became CEO. It's from V7 source code.

SCO has removed the V7 source from their website but the wayback machine has the original release. SCO's case is well and truly baseless.

Yay! Linux wins. World domination is one step closer today.

Oh, a legal troll

[mec]

Well, armchair lawyer, comment on these legal observations:

(1) In a copyright suit several years ago, Judge Kimball dismissed the case because the plaintiff had declined to inform the defendant of infringing activity. Similarly, SCO has declined to inform Linus Torvalds of any infringing lines of code in any kernel that Torvalds distributes.

You do know who Judge Kimball is and why his opinions are important in this case, don't you?

(2) In the Napster case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an action for contributory infringement requires the plaintiff to provide specific notice to the defendant of the infringing work. Point to the specific notice which SCO has provided Linus Torvalds.

(3) For a preliminary injunction, the movant must claim that the actions of the other party are causing ongoing, irreversible harm to the movant. The court then balances this claim with the irreversible harm to the other party that would be caused by granting the injunction.

Question: identify the ongoing actions which IBM, the defendant, is currently taking which are causing irreversible harm to SCO. Remember what "irreversible" means in this context. On the other side, identify the irreversible harm to Linus Torvalds, Red Hat, and other people who are not even parties to the suit, if a court enjoins them from publishing their own work on their own terms.

(4) Bonus question: discuss the doctrine of mitigation of harm. Reconcile this with Darl McBride's public statement that SCO will not identify the specific code in question "because then Red Hat would just take it out".

Re:No difference

[ewhac]

Nope, your first translation is incorrect. Recall that i-- is a post-decrement operation; the decrement always happens, but the lvalue of i is the value it has before it gets decremented. This means you'll end up with the following:

; pseudo-assembly translation of 'for (i = MAX; i--; ) { ... }
LOD R1,__MAX
JMP END_LOOP
BODY_LOOP:
; -- blah blah blah
END_LOOP:
MOV R2, R1 ; R2 <-- R1
DEC R1
TST R2
JNZ BODY_LOOP

There's a MOV and TST in there that don't need to be there. Your second translation was more correct:

; pseudo-assembly translation of 'for (i = MAX; --i >= 0; ) { ... }
LOD R1,__MAX
JMP END_LOOP
BODY_LOOP:
; -- blah blah blah
END_LOOP:
DEC R1
JGE BODY_LOOP

Schwab