Back To SCO

wampl3r writes " Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens deliver a great response to SCO's recent Letter to the Open Source Community. Their response does a good job of presenting many of the finer points we have been arguing about around here, but it's nice to see them in such a formal, well-thought-out letter." Munchola adds "Meanwhile, ComputerWire, from where McBride misquoted Perens in the first place, sets the record straight: 'In his statement McBride appears to have attributed a ComputerWire paraphrase as a quote from Perens.'" stefan points to this response to McBride's letter from Kevin Bedell, LinuxWorld Magazine's Editor. Below, find one reader's idea about the "stolen lines" SCO claims are in the Linux kernel, and one expert's claim that SCO might not know some of its own source code very well.

VikingBrad writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on Dr Warwick Toomey of The Unix Heritage Society claiming that SCO may not know the origin of code in System V, including claims that there is a lot of BSD software in Sys V."

Alex writes "I wondered where the 100k+ lines of copied code in the linux kernel would come from in comparison to the SCO Unixware stuff. Then a thought popped up in my head: what if they just compared linewise? All those empty lines in the code would have the same content. But how many empty lines are in the Linux Kernel Code? This small shell script counts them for you:

emptylines=0; function parse_dir () { for file in $1/*; do if [ -d "$file" ]; then parse_dir $file; else while read line; do if [ "$line" = "" ]; then emptylines=$[$emptylines+1]; echo $emptylines; fi; done

Kernel 2.4.22, yet cleaned of the code which SCO claimed was stolen, has still 733140 empty lines, probably copied and pasted by the bad, bad kernel developers from the good, good SCO guys..."

Comments

disappointed

[kurosawdust]

Aww man, the one time I want ESR to mention his gun collection and he doesn't do it!

blank lines?

[chochos]

Does this mean I have to remove all the blank lines from all my code to avoid being sued by SCO?

Re:They've copyrighted BLANK LINES!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about the "This page intentionally left blank" world?

Any page claiming it is blank is lying.

Godwin's Law!

[*weasel]

this one's done, next thread!

Trogdor Burninates Karma

[La Temperanza]

Oh SCO would just claim the virus code was their IP all along, and claim license fees from everyone who's still running it - people whose IP they can get easily as it keeps contacting their website! I've found out I cannot pass the day without reading the daily SCO item on slashdot. Dennis got into the act after Linus called his code ugly: damn, them be fightin' words!

This Comment was generated with the Comment-O-Matic for SCO Stories.

Re:They've copyrighted BLANK LINES!!!!

[stevesliva]

I would think that a "blank line" pretty accurately reflects the intellectual property of SCO. This opinion is mine, and not my employer's.

Re:Let's make this a press release!

[schon]

We need facts, not opinions.

Why? Lack of facts hasn't stopped SCO - why should it stop us? :o)

I'm Sonna Sue SCO!!!

[Mnemennth]

I have in my possession an 8" floppy containing 73,000 empty lies of code, borrowed from my desk during negotiations with SCO for my CP/M floppy disk defragging utility!
NO! You can't SEE the disk! Well, mabe a picture of it...

*Cackle*

Mnem

Re:Let's make this a press release!

[stratjakt]

Thing is, to successfully issue a press release, the press has to give a shit who you are.

Case in point, I ran out of Pop Tarts this morning and held a press conference about it and my plans to get some more at Super Fresh, but hardly anyone showed up - except for C-SPAN.

When you are in a hole...stop digging....

[Lord Custos]

Rather than defend the "don't ask, don't tell" Linux intellectual property policy that caused the SCO v IBM case, the Open Source community should focus on customers' needs. The Open Source community should assure that Open Source software has a solid intellectual property foundation that can give confidence to end users. - Darl McBride.

Darl, Darl, Darl...haven't you ever heard the adage "When you are in a hole, stop digging"?
You could climb out of the hole you dug yourself into. But you decided to spew more slander, libel and FUD instead.
Back in July, we offered you a firemans ladder
In August, we threw down a rope.
Are we going to have to send down spelunkers, or should we wait until you pop up in China?
(By the way, Darl, you don't want to end up in China. Thats a Linux country.)

Re:+5

[MoxCamel]

We will not attempt to erect a compromise with you on a foundation of dishonesty.

Heh heh...he said erect...

Darl McBride is a Big Fat Idiot: A Fair and Balanced Review of SCO

Re:Let's make this a press release!

[stratjakt]

But unless anyone's heard of you and cares what you have to say, noone will read it, let alone publish it.

Unless it's a realllllllly slow news day.

Breaking news..


GUY ON SLASHDOT THINKS DARL MCBRIDE BIG FAG (AP)

blah blah blah blah

Reminds me of an old lawyer joke....

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Q) When Darl McBride is in a hole up to his neck in sand, what do you have?

A) Not enough sand.

Translation

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Wow. That's a well-crafted piece of literature. Unspecting high school freshmen will one day have to read that and dissect it as part of "US Literature". Assuming the schools can still teach reading by then.

Meanwhile, I ran the article through Babelfish:

Dear Mr. McBride,

You suck.

With all due respect,
The Open Source Community

SCO does what no other vendor has ever done...

[weave]

Wow, after all the religious wars on slashdot over microsoft, linux, apple, star wars, diablo, etc, etc, we have finally found a topic that everyone agrees on -- SCO sucks.

Surely SCO must have some plants that can post some positive SCO-defending material here?!

What do you say?

[MuParadigm]

"Hey, he's got child porn on his workstation!"