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SGI Compares Linux & System V Source Code

mrgoatCEO writes "It seems SGI has finished up their test comparing SCO's Unix System V code and that of the Linux Kernel, according to ITWorld. SGI found that any similarities between the systems (amounting to only about 200 lines of code) have been removed in Linux Kernel 2.4.22, and added that the similarities were 'trivial in amount.'" This follows moves by SCO to terminate SGI's Unix license.

31 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. reminder about shares by Neophytus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Keep a watch on those stock prices and insider trades. Its not like they are even trying to hide it any more.

    1. Re:reminder about shares by PowerBert · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The writing is on the wall.
      They're not just dumping stock. According to El Reg they dropped a reseller of 30 years today.

    2. Re:reminder about shares by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 5, Informative

      "Monninkhof tried to reason with SCO, but didn't succeed. At first SCO agreed to talk, so Monninkhof flew to SCO's headquarters in Utah, but learned that there was no-one to meet him and that visitors were not allowed in the building. Security then escorted Monninkhof off the premises. He was also given a letter indicating that his company was no longer welcome at SCO Forum."

      If there was any doubt about the kind of people running SCO these days, this should clinch it. Damn cold..

    3. Re:reminder about shares by Chicane-UK · · Score: 5, Funny

      Heh.. it wasn't that SCO didn't want to meet him.. its just that their entire company now consists of lawyers, and the upper upper management. They were all too busy preparing press releases and law suits to come down and meet him ;)

      --
      "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
    4. Re:reminder about shares by Ark42 · · Score: 4, Informative


      For the lazy, since June 20 it looks like they have sold shares for a total amount of $2,747,819

    5. Re:reminder about shares by antibryce · · Score: 4, Funny
      They were all too busy preparing press releases and law suits to come down and meet him ;)


      Given the general spiritual realm I'm sure we all agree lawyers and marketing folks hail from, shouldn't that be "come up and meet him"?

    6. Re:reminder about shares by ErikJson · · Score: 4, Funny
      This looks funny
      19-Aug-03 BROUGHTON, REGINALD CHARLES Employee
      19-Aug-03 BROUGHTON, REGINALD CHARLES Senior Vice President

      26-Aug-03 BROUGHTON, REGINALD CHARLES Senior Vice President
      2-Sep-03 BROUGHTON, REGINALD CHARLES Employee

      11-Sep-03 OLSON, MICHAEL P Vice President
      11-Sep-03 OLSON, MICHAEL P Controller

      Darl: "Ok, now it's your turn to be Vice president. "
      Michael: "Come on! Again? I did that last week!"
      Darl: "There are only five of us eft here, remember?"

    7. Re:reminder about shares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      well i happened to have the misfortune of being there two weeks ago.

      I was visiting another company and happened to to walk into there building by mistake.

      Security?? I didnt see any, rather attractive young girl on reception though who didnt seem to know much. I asked for the person i was supposed to be seeing and it took her about 10mins to release they had no one by that name or dept working there.

      Whole building had a really cold dead empty feel to it. On the way out i noticed people coming and going by the side exist loading bucket loads of hardware into (pcs, printers, etc...) into peoples car. Odd i thought.

      Wasnt until i left the meeting i was supposed to be at that i saw the big SCO letter above the building i went to originally!!!

      Anyway from the way people where loading up there cars with hardware it definatly had sinking ship look about it with people grabbing what they could now.

  2. SGI calling SCO... by Mr.+Flibble · · Score: 4, Funny

    SGI:Hello SCO!
    SCO:Hello.
    SGI:We have just one word for you.
    SCO:And that would be?
    SGI:OWNZOR!!
    SCO:D'oh!

    Note, the above has been checked against the Linux kernel and System V source and it matches neither. (You hear that down there in Salt Lake City?)

    --
    Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
  3. SCO Response by johnnyb · · Score: 4, Funny

    SCO said that there are still unpatched systems that are running with the "benefit" of those lines of code. Shouldn't that be "weighted down" or "burdened" insetad.?

  4. A little more detail please by OzPhIsH · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, SGI has something we've all been wanting access to, essentially the System V Source. They run a check against the Linux kernal for infingement and only tell us a summary of their findings? Why can't they be more specific? Why can't they say lines 100-110 of module X in Y in the linux kernal came up infringing. They don't have to reveal any "sco owned" code, just what is already opened sourced on the Linux side. I'm I missing something?

    --

    "To lead the people, you must walk behind them"

    1. Re:A little more detail please by DrWhizBang · · Score: 5, Insightful

      SGI wants it to be blatantly obvious that they have done nothing to deserve the wrath of SCO. Their approach is differnt than IBM - IBM says "Make my day, SCO. Mess with IBM and feel the hurt!!!". SGI says, "Very sorry, but we don't know what you're talking about. Now please go away?"

      Since SCO is refusing to release that data, SGI does not see any need to - they have clearly washed their hands of the problem, and don't intend to provoke SCO any more than they have to.

      Personally, I am very impressed with SGI's attitude in this whole ordeal - they stay out of it until SCO says something stupid, and then they very matter of factly point out that SCO is wrong, and carry on.

      --
      Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
  5. Re:*gasp* by overbyj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am really starting to believe the theory put out earlier that this is a a real pump and dump scheme. In Darl's contract, it states that he is in for a big payday if there are four consecutive quarters of profitability. The four quarters are over in February which conveniently is the time the IBM countersuit is supposed to get going again after the continuance.

    As much as this whole fiasco sucks, you have to give Darl credit for being a master at pump and dump here if this is the case. Come February, I would not be surprised in the least bit if there is a sudden resignation by him and he relocates to somewhere in the south Pacific or Carribean.

    --
    No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
  6. Good to be kept honest, anyway. by Skyshadow · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In the final analysis, this whole production might end up being a Good Thing.

    First and foremost, it's good to be kept honest -- having other people's IP slipped into your codebase by well-meaning (or otherwise) people is a risk in all development projects. At least with OSS, a company can find the code and get it removed; someday, this will probably be used by a company acting in good faith (as opposed to SCO).

    Second, it'll be nice to have the GPL tested out in court if for no other reason than the ability to point to it and say "it's been tested, it stands up". Given that a lot of important development in the next 10-15 years will be utilizing the GPL as Free-as-in-Speech products slowly displace proprietary fundementals like operating systems, it's important to the industry in general to work out any "bugs" in the GPL and get a prescident established sooner than later.

    And hey, it'll be nice to see McBride brought up on those fraud charges, too -- you can't defraud your investors like this and expect to skate unless you're buddies with the guy in the White House, after all.

    --
    Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
    1. Re:Good to be kept honest, anyway. by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Informative
      I don't think they'll get to the GPL issue. It will be like the old ATT case, where the court determined that the plaintiff did not have a valid copyright interest in the code in question, and the case ended there.

      Bruce

    2. Re:Good to be kept honest, anyway. by RealAlaskan · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Second, it'll be nice to have the GPL tested out in court if for no other reason than the ability to point to it and say "it's been tested, it stands up".

      That's not going to happen; at least, not with a sane defendent. The GPL doesn't restrict my rights to (for example) the Linux kernel: it adds rights which copyright law would not give me. If I ``defeated'' the GPL in court, I would lose, since I would lose those additional rights. Anyone who considers challenging the GPL will soon find that it's a fight he can't afford to win ... or lose.

      Only an insane party would challenge the GPL under those terms. SCO has talked about it, but they haven't put any of those loony ``legal theories'' in any of their court filings, so far as I know.

      ... it's important to the industry in general to work out any "bugs" in the GPL and get a prescident established sooner than later.

      Well, yes, it is. But we won't be able to do it in court: no one who is compos mentis is going to take us there, or let us drag him there.

      For the tin-foil-hat crowd, Microsoft might gain by eliminating the GPL. The temporary confusion and delay could give them a few months of breathing room. Still, even if they are funding SCO's sillyness, I doubt that ``break the GPL'' is on their list for Santa, let alone a serious plan.

    3. Re:Good to be kept honest, anyway. by bstadil · · Score: 4, Funny
      At least SCO is not 100% dishonest.

      Take their employment section as an example

      --
      Help fight continental drift.
    4. Re:Good to be kept honest, anyway. by DaveAtFraud · · Score: 4, Informative
      That's not going to happen; at least, not with a sane defendent.

      We're talking SCO here; so what's your point?

      On a more serious note, a poster to GROKLAW ran across this SCO product brochure from 2002 which points out that the very features that SCO says infringe on their intellectual property (XFS, JFS, NUMA, etc.) are selling points in SCO's version of Linux. This makes it kind of hard for SCO to claim that they didn't know these features had been included in Linux and their release of the code under the GPL doesn't constitute GPLing the code.

      I could be wrong but this only leaves SCO with three choices:

      1. They can't complain about the features, just individual code fragments. They have just told SGI that fixing the individual code fragments isn't sufficient.
      2. They challenge the GPL.
      3. Drop the suits against IBM and SGI and watch their stock tank.
      --
      They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
      Ben
    5. Re:Good to be kept honest, anyway. by platypus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ahem, and that's because FreeBSD has the corporate backing it has, compared to linux, heh?

      GPL is all about corporations cooperating (sic!), without fearing to be burned that way.

      Take your MAC OS X = BSD+Darwin+Cococa (no nitpicking about that formula, please).
      Do you really think IBM would feel compelled to contribute something important to Darwin under the BSD license, with the effect to make OS X a better performing server, but without in turn profiting from Apples additions?
      The effect of the BSD license and apples adoption of BSD technology is precisely that from now on no potential competitor of apple will add something to this technology under a free license, if he thinks it might be valuable to apple.

      Oh, and btw. the handful of people being caught by microsofts GPL-is-viral-fud are lost cases anyway.

  7. Run Comparator against BSD now by surfinbox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "This comparison revealed a few examples of line-by-line copying, but did not determine whether the code was owned by SCO or in the public domain."
    If Comparator were run against the appropriate *BSD (AT&T public source, right?) I wonder how many of offending script segments would be taken as not SCO's/SysV.

  8. Release the sums ... by taniwha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So SGI ran Eric's program that makes MD5 sums from a source file - why not release those sums so people can do independant analysis? (I can just imagine SCO's lawyers reving up ... "your honor it's a derived work", "we own those numbers" ...)

  9. Unfortunately.... by interiot · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Unfortunately SGI is talking only about SGI submitted code:
    • The point of SGI's comparison was to search for any potential matches between Unix System V and any contributions that SGI made to the Linux kernel, not to vet the software for the entire community, Estes said in an interview. "We are not making any kind of representation at all about anybody else's contributed code," he said.
    So SCO could still potentially be right in saying that IBM submitted a lot of Unix code into Linux.

    Curiously, because SGI has access to both codebases, and know how to run the Comparator, SGI probably has a good idea how many non-SGI violations are in the code (eg. the details may be complicated, but surely they can guess within an order of magnitude). So for now, it's IBM and SGI knowing and not telling, SCO knowing and saying as many ludicrous things as possible, and the rest of us left to speculate until this thing goes to court.

  10. Re:Hmmm, 200 lines out of millions by Phosphor3k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    DeCSS is only ~240 lines of code.

  11. Re:Kernel Changelog (fix) by Bigby · · Score: 5, Informative

    "sgi" Changelog information from the 2.4.22 kernel.

    jbarnes@sgi.com[helgaas]:
    o ia64: ACPI fix for no PCI

    jh@sgi.com[helgaas]:
    o ia64: SGI SN update
    o ia64: SN2 update 030528
    o ia64: SN2 update 030630

    kaos@sgi.com[helgaas]:
    o ia64: fix scratch-regs handling in kernel unwinder
    o ia64: unwind.c - allow unw_access_gr(r0)
    o ia64: Trivial stack-size correction in mca.c
    o ia64: mca rendezvous fix
    o ia64: Hold modlist_lock while searching exception tables
    o ia64: Handle SAL rejection of MCA rendezvous timeout value

  12. Bank Robbers by blunte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bank robbers nowdays, if they manage to get out of the bank with some money, almost always get caught.

    I always think, "Wow! Who would be stupid enough to try to rob a bank anymore?"

    Darl and his gang are simply pulling the stock market equivalent to robbing a bank. They'll make off with some money, but shortly afterward they'll get reeled in.

    SCOX will get slammed once the clue hits the fan for the public here in a few months. Unlike Darl's Ikon lawsuit, which was an altogether different theft than this one, this robbery is right out in public view, and it's not going to go unnoticed.

    Once the party is over and the SCOX investor dupes have lost their money, there will be shareholder suits against Darl and other executive and members of the board. There will be SEC investigations (that should have already begun, but public outcry haven't forced yet).

    The good news for Darl, I guess, is that he'll manage to stash some of the loot for safe keeping, and the business world will forgive him so he can pull another stunt someday in the future.

    We can only hope that he's barred from becoming an executive or board member of a publicly traded company in the future.

    --
    .sigs are for post^Hers.
  13. Re:Hmmm, 200 lines out of millions by jdcook · · Score: 4, Informative
    "Copyright law allows for reasonable copying, e.g., a few pages from a book. So surely 200 lines of code out of millions would simply be laughed out of court?

    This is profoundly wrong. Copyright law does not allow you to copy a few pages out of a book. It allows you to make Fair Use of copyrighted material. It may be fair use for you to copy an entire book. It may not be fair use for you to copy a single paragraph. There is no "use X many free" formula. People get in trouble believing this.

    --
    Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
  14. Re:This rose by any other name would just smell by lightspawn · · Score: 4, Funny

    Can someone please tell me what SCO really stands for?

    Star Control Online?
    Soul Calibur Online?
    Speakerbraclet Candletruck Operations?

  15. Dilbert quote: by mike449 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Dogbert: I can't tell you my plans for the assets of this company...but it rhymes with 'village'.

    Dilbert: I hope it's "fillage"...

  16. Not That This Matters Any by ONOIML8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some people still don't get it.

    What SGI found makes no difference. In the end it doesn't matter one bit if the Sys V code is the KJV of the holy bible and the Linux code is actually a Monty Python script in chinese.

    None of this matters.

    Why?

    Get it thru your heads people, this is all about stock prices and what the executives can liquidate and move out of the country. They don't give a rats arse about collateral damage and the facts don't have a role in this game.

    I've lived thru this before with Gulf Resources and the Bunker Hill Superfund.....believe me this is no different. It's all about a few people taking the money and laughing their way to some off shore bank.

    Please do not let facts like this SGI thing distract you from the truth. Believe me, SCO isn't.

    --
    . Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
  17. Shifting names by mcc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Originally SCO stood for "Santa Cruz Operation".

    Eventually, SCO sold off its OS division, the one that made SCO UNIX and coincidentally happened at the time to own the original Unix copyrights (having bought them from Novell in 1995), to Caldera, a linux company. The remainder of what used to be SCO, the part Caldera didn't buy, is still operating under the name Tarantella.

    Caldera, after buying SCO UNIX, changed its name to "The SCO Group." SCO doesn't stand for anything here. It's just "The SCO Group". Shortly after this the company's co-founder, Ransom Love, was replaced as CEO by Darl McBride, and SCO began to serve the Wyrm.

    "The SCO Group" is owned by and has since Caldera's inception basically been under the auspices of an umbrella corporation called the Canopy Group. It has been repeatedly theorized that somewhere about the time McBride came in, the Canopy Group gave up on ever making any money ever again on Caldera's projects. Now, goes the theory, the Canopy Group is using the SCO group for no purpose other than as a front/shell company, so that the Canopy Group can engage in illegal but profitable enterprises such as slander, barratry, and fraud, and then when all hell breaks loose as a result and the countersuits start rolling in, "the SCO Group" gets all the blame and takes all the damage and quietly goes bankrupt, and the Canopy Group walks away scot-free.

  18. Re:30, 17, whatever by falzer · · Score: 5, Funny

    > 2003 - 1986 = ???

    Umm... profit?