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SCO's Next Target: SGI?

Posted by michael on from the we-know-you-missed-your-dose-of-SCO dept.

FatRatBastard writes "ZDNet News is speculating that SCO's next target in its legal actions against Linux may be SGI. According to the article its legal strategy will be to claim that XFS is a Unix derivative and therefore under SCO control, much like they claim JFS is in their suit with IBM. One fact not mentioned in the article that would support SGI being the next target is the malloc code they claimed was infringing at this years SCOForum was copyrighted SGI."

1 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Yuk Yuk - Bring 'em on! (Former SGI guy speaks) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hehe, bring 'em on. If you're going to pick a F/S to attack, XFS is a perfect choice for SCO. It was developed independently, and I'd love to see SCO find one shread of old unix F/S tech besides the word 'vnode' in there. You go SCO! [Disclaimer, I only worked with the project back when it was an SGI-only system, who knows what happened during the Linux port].

    I think someone at SCO noticed that SGI had a SysV license (the later versions of SGI's IRIX had a good hunk of licensed SysV in there - same goes for the Solaris folks, I think everyone moved to SysV in the early 90's when it looked like 'the thing' to do).

    It'll be a good stretch for SCO to claim that XFS is a derived work in any real form. The only overlapping code would be the vnode entry points and some things related to the buffer cache, and those you really have no choice but to implement the SysV interfaces and that's easy to prove (maybe .1% or less of the FS code involved). The rest of XFS is a huge original undertaking. There's nothing quite like it (B-trees everywhere).