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SCO: Code Proof Analyzed, Linus Interviewed
Arker writes "Bruce Perens has now obtained a copy of the entire slide show from which the recently scrutinized SCO-related Linux code excerpts came, and has analyzed the remainder of the 'evidence' they presented there. Their other code exhibit turns out to have been the venerable Berkeley Packet Filter(!), and their revised line-counts are consistent with simply adding together all the lines of code that have been contributed by Unix licensees." Also, Iphtashu Fitz writes "A new interview with Linus Torvalds has been posted on eWeek.com. In it he slams SCO over the recently leaked source code. Among other things, he points out in the interview that some of the code in question has been removed from the 2.6 kernel ['because developers complained about how "ugly" it was'] before SCO even started complaining."
let the major media outlets catch on to this.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
eWeek: For its part though, SCO has said that there are so many lines of code, and a variety of applications and devices that use that code, that simply removing the offending code would not be technically feasible or possible and would not solve the problem. Do you agree?
Torvalds: "They are smoking crack"
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You gotta love Linus. It's not just that he speaks his mind, it's that he's just cavalier about what he says.
On a serious note, I'd like to see some the guys involved with SMP or JFS or NUMA get together and *sue SCO.* Tell them they want a cut of any license they collect on unless they can PROVE they aren't claiming ownership of parts of their GPL/BSD contributed code.
First SCO said they weren't going to show the code because they had to "protect their secrets" -- those secrets being the copyrighted code itself.
.c file written by anyone at Sun, SGI, H-P, IBM, Sequent, Cray or any other licensee belongs to them.
Then they went on extortion trips to Japan and around the U.S. Neither panned out, with major companies like Oracle, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi and H-P calling their bluff. Accusations without proof are meaningless.
They showed code snippets under super-tight NDAs, mostly to non-geeks, who promptly said "yep, they look the same". Of COURSE they looked the same! Would SCO show code that doesn't match? The fact that it was all out of context didn't seem to matter.
When THAT didn't convince anyone, they started showing bits of code without an NDA -- and the rest of the world found out why IBM, Oracle, Fujitsu, et. al. isn't afraid and why SCO was so reluctant to show the code in the first place.
SCO is clueless. They have no idea what they own and what they don't. They don't know what they, as Caldera and SCO, gave away and what they "borrowed" from others for their own. They simply assume that any
Somebody just did a "diff" between the SCO source and a Linux kernel and went off from there.
Just watching them escalate the claims day after day gives a clue. First it is dozens of lines, then hundreds, then thousands, and now MILLIONS!
The truth is SCO probably had NO intention of this getting to the discovery phase -- they were hoping for a settlement or buyout before all this came to light.
They are quite desparate now.
Damn! I wish I bought SCOX back in November.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Whatever for?
If it's to help develop a competing approach to solving a problem, I'm all for it: whichever one winds up proving to be best at solving the problem should be the one adopted, even if it's the other camp's solution.
But dumping the BSD code just to be "unique" is silly.
With respect to this SCO nonsense, the only thing I care about is whether or not the origins of the contributed code can be traced. If a piece of code winds up in, say, FreeBSD, I expect they have checked its source as thoroughly as the Linux maintainers would for any code contributed directly to Linux. In short, I see little reason to discriminate between the two.
Finally, if a piece of code winds up in either distribution that shouldn't, then it's a moderately simple matter of pulling the code and rewriting it if necessary if it's found that the contributer who donated the code did so without proper authorization. One would hope that a court would find the action of such removal and rewriting in the face of accidental infringement to be sufficient remedial action once the infringing code is revealed. But this is the U.S. legal system we're talking about here, and it seems to be so screwed up that I can't dismiss the possibility that it would rule heavily against an accidental infringer. In fact, things seem bad enough that I have to consider such a situation to be likely.
Sigh...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I tried to sue a company that was, in my view, in blatant violation of copyright law awhile back.
A company by the name of Head Games Publishing had downloaded a couple hundred Quake levels that had been created by a number of gamers, stripped their copyright notices, burned up a bunch of CDs with the levels and sold it as their own. The question that the lawyers kept asking me was "How much money did you lose as a result of their violating your copyright?" Because my primary objective in enforcing my copyright was to insure that anyone could download and enjoy my levels free of charge, I couldn't really name a dollar amount.
This apparently made it difficult to sue. I had $10,000 of my own money that I was willing to spend on this, and I could not convince the attorneys at Lane Powell Spears Luberski in Seattle to take the case. The impression that I came away with was that because of the lack of money involved with keeping the intellectual property "free", they didn't think that I (or they) would get anything out of winning the suit, and they weren't willing to take my paltry 10 grand to demonstrate that to me, which I guess I appreciate.
The situation that I was in may be similar to the SCO/JFS situation. Individual copyright owners of the JFS could have as much difficulty suing SCO as I had trying to enforce copyright ownership of intellectual property that I wanted to make freely available under a particular license.
Because Alan Cox is, frankly, rather brighter than Darl McBride. Yes, I know, as others have posted, IBM and others have contributed to Linux' multi-processing code. But it worked extremely well before they did - I know, I was running a dual processor Pentium Pro with dual RAID5 arrays in late 1996 or early 1997, and that was running on Alan Cox's SMP patch to the 2.2 kernel (might even have been a 2.0 kernel).
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.