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SGI's Letter to the Linux Community
_Upsilon_ writes "SGI has released a letter to the Linux community in response to SCO's recent threat to revoke the UNIX licence for Irix. The letter mentions that they inadvertently did submit some System V code into the Linux kernel, that has since been removed (and some more in the process of being removed). The article points out that the code fragments in question had already been released into the public domain as well."
If SCO goes after SGI and continues to go after their own customers, they will eventually obliterate their own customer base. This is just more proof of Mr. McBride's roadmap for SCO (which mysteriously resembles a downward spiral).
I'm just waiting for the SEC to wake up and realize that all of this was done so that the execs @ SCO could line their pockets.
SCO: You copied our Intellectual Property!!
[Company X]: No we didn't... that code's from the BSD codebase.
SCO: Oh... ok... well we're going to sue you anyways and revoke your UNIX license.
[Company X]: Whatever... go away or I'll replace you with a small shell script.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
October 1, 2003 To the Linux Community: As one of many contributors to the Open Source movement and to Linux, SGI takes the subject of intellectual property rights seriously. Our contributions are a valuable expression of ideas which contribute to the intellectual richness of Linux. Over the past four years, SGI has released over a million lines of code under an open source license. Throughout, we have carried out a rigorous internal process to ensure that all software contributed by SGI represents code we are legally entitled to release as open source. When a question was raised by the community earlier in the summer about the ate_utils.c routine, we took immediate action to address it. We quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions to open source, and found brief fragments of code matching System V code in three generic routines (ate_utils.c, the atoi function and systeminfo.h header file), all within the I/O infrastructure support for SGI's platform. The three code fragments had been inadvertently included and in fact were redundant from the start. We found better replacements providing the same functionality already available in the Linux kernel. All together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than 200 lines out of the more than one million lines of our overall contributions to Linux. Notably, it appears that most or all of the System V code fragments we found had previously been placed in the public domain, meaning it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case. As a precaution, we promptly removed the code fragments from SGIs Linux website and distributed customer patches, and released patches to the 2.4 and 2.5 kernels on June 30 and July 3 to replace these routines and make other fixes to the SGI infrastructure code that were already in progress at SGI. Our changes showed up in the 2.5 kernel within a few weeks of our submission, and the 2.4 changes were available in the production version of the 2.4 kernel as of August 25 when the 2.4.22 kernel was released. Thus, the code in question has been completely removed. Following this occurrence, we continued our investigation to determine whether any other code in the Linux kernel was even conceivably implicated. As a result of that exhaustive investigation, SGI has discovered a few additional code segments (similar in nature to the segments referred to above and trivial in amount) that may arguably be related to UNIX code. We are in the process of removing and replacing these segments. SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any sense, and SGI has full rights to license it to whomever we choose and to contribute it to open source. It may be that SCO is taking the position that merely because XFS is also distributed along with IRIX it is somehow subject to the System V license. But if so, this is an absurd position, with no basis either in the license or in common sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX System V. I hope this answers some of the questions that you and the Linux community might have. We continue to release new Linux work, and are very excited about the growth and acceptance of Linux. We are continuing full speed to do new work and release new Linux products. We take our responsibility to the open source community seriously and are confident that we have an effective process to verify the quality and integrity of our contributions to Linux. Rich Altmaier VP of Software, SGI richa@sgi.com
At the same time, it's hard for SCO to claim damages in this case as the amount was not only small, but redundant, and easily replaced. If SCO saw one cent of loss from those 200 lines, I'll be damned. They more likely see loss from idiotic legal strategies build upon half-truths and blatent disregard for their own customer base. (RIAA, anyone?)
#define DRM chmod 000
ROFLMAO!
- Sw Usr
SGI finding code that they had to remove actually will add doubts.
What other compnaies "incorrectly" added code?
Why wasn't this caught before?
Even if there is a "clean sweep" of the code, what prevents this from occuring again?
SGI admiting that code was added and shouldn't have been is NOT a good thing towards removing doubt.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Yes, I realize I'm an idiot. Apparently mozilla's autocomplete logged me back in, that was supposed to be posted anonymously so my offtopic mod didn't get removed. Oh well. Comment still stands.
Not good for the anti SCO side of the suit..
Shows a precedent of wrong doing that helps substantiate SCO's claims...
---- Booth was a patriot ----