More Damning SCO Evidence At Groklaw

An anonymous reader writes "There's a very interesting story up at Groklaw right now. PJ reports on new evidence that Chris Hellwig, a SCO employee, contributed code to SMP, XFS, and JFS and did so with the knowledge of his supervisor." Groklaw is thorough, and this is another good example of just quite how thorough.

Comments

Mr Hellwig

[Anonymous Coward]

Christoph Hellwig has been working with Linux since about 1995, dealing with kernel-related issues much of the time. He has been invloved in many Open Source projects, raging from small fixes to major contributions.

He is in the top-ten list of commits to both the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 tree according to the Bitkeeper statistics (which he hasn't faked himself but still should be taken with care).

After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution. Last year he joined the fileystem and storage group at SGI and is focussing on XFS for Linux now.

http://www.ukuug.org/bios+profiles/CHellwig.shtm l

Full article text, properly formatted, no troll

[nacturation]

In its Supplemental Responses to IBM's Second Interrogatories and Second Requests for Documents, SCO gave this answer:

"Insofar as this interrogatory seeks information as to whether plaintiff has ever distributed the code in question or otherwise made it available to the public, SCO has never authorized, approved or knowingly released any part of the subject code that contains or may contain its confidential and proprietary information and/or trade secrets for inclusion in any Linux kernel or as part of any Linux distribution."

Cross your heart and hope to die, SCO? Or cross your fingers behind your back? Let's see what the evidence shows.

SCO has specifically mentioned the following four as being code at issue in this case: JFS, NUMA, RCU, and SMP, and while it is conceivable that the "subject code" they are talking about in this response to IBM's interrogatory is referring to some other code, it seems reasonable to look at the code they have mentioned publicly. Actually, it's more than reasonable. It's our only choice, until they tell us exactly what code they are complaining about with specificity. Is it true that they never "authorized, approved or knowingly released" any of this code for inclusion in any Linux kernel or as part of any Linux distribution?

Let's start with JFS. In the case of JFS, they not only distributed Linux with JFS, one of Caldera's employees, Christoph Hellwig, contributed code to JFS, as Groklaw reported on July 18. Here is a snip from that article:

"Here is an email in which he tells an inquirer how to contribute to JFS, including this tidbit: 'I've run native sysvfs tools under linux, but as now that I'm Linux sysvfs maintainer I'm looking into implementing free versions of it. . . . The JFS/Linux core team has setup a CVS commitinfo, but currently I'm the only one who receives it.'

"And here he encourages someone to donate to the main JFS repository at IBM and talks about his role:

"'I'm one of the main commiters to JFS outside IBM and I'm really happy to see more people involved :)

"'First I'd like to encourage you to contribute your userspace changes to the main JFS repository at IBM. For the 1.0.11 release I have added autoconf/automake support to easify portability and a bunch of portablity patches (mostly getting rid of linuxisms) is under way to the Core team.'

"He also posts to the freebsd list as freebsd-fs at freebsd.org.

"Here is the press release when SCO in 2002 released 'SCO Linux Server 4.0 for the Itanium (R) Processor Family' and which mentions that the product is based on United Linux. This SCO page lists JFS as one of its features. . . .

"They are complaining that IBM contributed JFS to Linux, but their own employee, from this evidence, was involved in helping out. On the day IBM announced JFS was being given to Linux, Hellwig is listed as making five contributions to the kernel."

And he is listed on this page of JFS contributors. Here is IBM's page on Who Is Using JFS? and it lists United Linux. So they not only released a distro with JFS in it under the GPL, their employee helped make it h

Re:Leave SCO alone you communists.

[Kleedrac2]

You have a point, but I do believe most of the /. community is not so much defending IBM, but damning SCO because they aren't following the rules. In a copyright infringement you are supposed to recieve a "Cease & Desist" order first. Not only did Linux users globally get a "Cease & Desist" order, but SCO has never told any of us what exactly we are supposed to Cease or Desist! You can't tell somebody "Stop that" and not answer the obvious "Stop what?" you will get in response. And insofar as IBM's involvement, we're sticking up for them because they're sticking up for us who can't afford to fight this bullshit.

Kleedrac

Re:Pamela Jones and Groklaw is a huge asset

[Swampfox]

She's got my vote. But more importantly, she's got my cash. She has an innocuous little "Donate here" PayPal link on the left side of the page.

If you appreciate what she's doing, and the incredible amount of time and precision and effort behind it, take a minute and make a donation.

I finally got off my behind today and dropped her a few dollars.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Old news

[and by]

IANALBIAALS (but I am a law student)
Well, if the programmer had the OK to release this from a higher-up, or if he did so with a reasonable understanding that it was OK, he was acting within the scope of authority. At that point, SCO knew because he *was* SCO in terms of that transaction.

No so surprising

[arevos]

Similar thing happened with AT&T and BSD, IIRC. AT&T claimed that their code was in BSD. It went to court. It emerged that it was AT&T that had taken code from BSD, rather than the other way round. AT&T settled for an undisclosed amount.

Re:quotes from Chris..

[CrazyDuke]

Quothe Mr. Hellwig:

"It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware,
I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in
the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare.." (sic)

hint hint...

hint hint hint..

HINT HINT HINT HINT HINT!

Re:Supervisor = permission?

[gmhowell]

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It's called the doctrine of 'apparant authority'. If Hellwig and his supervisor acted on behalf of SCO, presented themselves as being representatives of SCO, and there was no reason for Linus not to believe this, they are acting for SCO.

Now, go back and read the article(s). SCO was advertising (on their own or via UnitedLinux) many of the features they are now suing over. They knew what was going on. They condoned it. They are engaging in barratry.

IANAL; clearly, neither are you.

Re:Conspiricy theory

[anwaya]

As one of the contributors to the article in question, I feel bound to offer some corrections to this argument. Employees of SCO and Caldera did not "give away the code" under the direction of their supervisors: they collaborated with the Linux development community, which includes people from IBM, in an effort to integrate SMP, JFS, NUMA and RCU in the kernel in order to produce an Enterprise class Linux.

The evidence that SCO was broadly aware of this work lies in the SCO Linux 4 ("powered by UnitedLinux") marketing materials.

There is an interview from August last year where Darl McBride not only says that SCO Linux would be "certified enterprise-ready by IBM", he also says that he understood what Open Source was in 1994, when he was first shown Linux.

I do not believe that Darl McBride can continue to pretend that he (i) didn't know what the GPL was about, or (ii) that he didn't know that Linux was going to the Enterprise.

Re:Old news

[cthugha]

I'm in Australia, where company law is governed at the Federal level and the law of agency wrt corporate relations with company outsiders is heavily affected by statute. Here's a (very) potted summary. At common law (also uniform in Australia because of our integrated court structure) the apparent authority of an agent can only be relied upon where appropriate representations have been made by the principal, and you would be right in that an outsider's belief in the existence of authority would be irrelevant (save for the rule in Royal British Bank v Turquand (1856) 6 E & B 327, which entitles outsiders to assume, in the absence of contrary evidence, that there has been compliance with a company's constitution and internal processes).

The statutory position (Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) ss 128-30) codifies the common law and allows certain "good faith" assumptions to be made, including that a person held out as an officer or agent is properly exercising the power customarily given to a person in that position. As the person giving away the code is a senior figure in SCO's open source operations it may be held, under Australian law, that the outsiders were entitled to assume that he was authorized to give away code on his corporate employer's behalf.

Again I have no idea of the general US position.

Re:We still have problems people....

[DaveAtFraud]

RTFA when the site isn't slashdotted. The kernel contribution records are just a small part of the puzzle. There is a s-pile of Caldera and SCO marketing blurbage, white papers and official technical documentation that says that SCOO knew at a corporate level what was in the 2.4.X Linux kernel (JFS, NUMA, SMP) and these details were being used as a selling point by Caldera/SCO. Admittedly, RCU tends to be burried pretty deeply but their is also evidence of official input from SCO and this is there least plausible "intellectual property" claim since, as an example, I was doing read, copy, update of circular buffers on VAX 782s (two CPU vaxen) in 1983.

What PJ & company have done is assemble the pieces to show that what was being contributed by Christoph Hellwig (and other peons at SCO) was well understood by both his immediate boss and by corporate management. There is no plausible deniability.

Probably the best thing to come out of all the GrokLaw digging is this quote:

"From: Jeff V. Merkey (jmerkey@timpanogas.com)
"Date: Wed Aug 23 2000 - 12:19:53 EST

"This whole SCO thing is overrated. I worked on the Unixware code base at Novell, and it's putrid in comparison to Linux. It's got a lot of good apps, but so does Linux. This kind of tripe propaganda is what the "cult" followers of Unixware are good at. They lost @ $ 38,000,000 dollars each year at Novell ramming UnixWare down our throats and pissing of our customers -- Novell finally cut rheir losses and sold it. Don't get me wrong, it's decent Unix stuff, but Linux is tons better as a general purpose PC Unix. Just remember, Caldera is a LINUX company -- they will take the best of both, and use it to improve Linux ...."
v :-)

Jeff

The full thread is here.

Re:Buying damage

[Xabraxas]

Doesn't this company have a history of this? If memory serves, Caldera (which is just SCO by another name, no?), made a pile a number of years ago by buying DR DOS from Digital Research and then turning around an suing Microsoft for alledgedly sabotaging versions of Windows 3.1x such that it would not run properly on DR DOS.

Funny though, I'll bet most of the /. crowd was on the Caldera side of that one. How times change.

That's because MS did actually sabotage DR DOS. DR DOS was better than MS DOS but if you tried to run it underneath windows instead of MS DOS, you would get error messages about using an incompatible version of DOS. Everything still worked but it would pop up error messages anyway.

Not exactly barratry. (IANAL)

[khasim]

They've only filed one legal case.

Just one.

They've said that they'd file more.

Lots more.

Maybe lots and lots more.

But they've only filed one so far.

Barratry means filing multiple cases to harass someone. Like if I drag you into court on some charge (real or not). Then I file another one against you. Then another one.

It would be VERY INTERESTING if SCO did file more claims and a judge ruled that SCO was attempting to harass "Linux".