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"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.
Quick, bust out vi and change all the variable names!
* 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)
*/
See Sys 7 1979 location
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.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
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?
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
Still doesn't prove shit for SCO's claim other than digital cameras are getting smaller and easier to hide.
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
if (size == 0)
return) ((ulong_t NULL);
What is this, amateur night?
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
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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?!?
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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, 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?
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.
Here's the earliest implementation people have found so far, from 1979 (before SCO was "born"):
l loc.c.html
1 BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/sys/sys/ma
And here's where it was part of BSD 2.11 circa 1992:
http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2.1
Oh, how I hope the mainstream tech press "gets" this.
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 or Here
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!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
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*???
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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.
RFC2119
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.
--Chag
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.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
Start of Thread
Conclusion
Check this out
patch@hp.com according to bitkeeper.
Also, this has been removed in 2.6, mainly because it was a stupid implementation.
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.
Check out the history good overview History
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 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.
* 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.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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.
I think, therefore I thought.
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 ?
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. ...
What about those of us who don't make spelling mistkaes?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
If these functions were implemented in Perl, they would be guaranteed to look different than the System V!
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...
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."
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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
Divide et impera!
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.
After all ... there can't be more than one person that actually comments their code, can there?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there exists a "dung cheese" in German cuisine, but I am repulsed.
Thanks for sharing. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Bruce Perens has written an analysis of the code that SCO claims was wrongfully copied into Linux: http://perens.com/Articles/SCOCopiedCode.html
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.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
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)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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.
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.m alloc.c.html
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ken/
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
It's been discovered that the code was submitted in linux by HP on March 9, 2002. The author was patch@hp.com
t Ke eper/deleted/.del-ate_utils.c~f3dbb032c5361f93@1.1 ?nav=hist/BitKeeper/deleted/.del-ate_utils.c~f3dbb 032c5361f93
.. what was that one fortune 500 company which paid up to SCO ?
http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.5/diffs/Bi
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
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!
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen