Groklaw Outlines More SCO Linux Contributions

An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw today reported that they have discovered another SCO programmer, Tigran Aivazian, who has committed code to the Linux kernel. According to the latest story Mr. Aivazian contributed a microcode update feature, a testing program, and made contributions to SMP and vmalloc. This new story adds weight to earlier stories about Caldera coder Chris Hellwig's additions to XFS, SMP and JFS. " Also on the SCO front, an anonymous reader writes "SCO's last Open Letter has drawn two new responses, one from Red Hat cofounder Bob Young, and the other from Jon 'maddog' Hall. 'maddog' makes a carefully reasoned rebuttal that defends the GPL and includes observations like 'How could the founding fathers or the early legislators have foreseen the Web, or even computers?' Young curtly offers McBride the following advice: 'Be less vocal' - making him the King Canute of Linux, perhaps, because it ain't gonna happen anytime soon."

Comments

Totally wrong

[Salsaman]

SCO sued IBM for allegedly adding code from AIX into Linux. Since SCO and IBM had a license agreement that forbade IBM from using AIX code in anything else, SCO sued IBM.

This article is interesting because it shows that some of the code allegedly added by IBM was in fact added by SCO itself.

Re:Totally wrong

[molnarcs]

What everyone seems to forget is that the code Mr. Aivazian submitted might have nothing to do with SCO's source. Most of the comments I have read so far speak of A's contributions as being SCO's contributions: "This article is interesting because it shows that some of the code allegedly added by IBM was in fact added by SCO itself."

From the article:

"For example in the case of BFS filesystem the matter was as follows. I did NOT use any of the UnixWare (or other) proprietary code for the implementation, of course. However, despite this fact, I still (for courtesy and generally being cautious) requested permission from Wendy (Development director) before the release under GPL and she confirmed that SCO has no claims to this work whatsoever and has no objections to its release under GPL, because it is not connected to UnixWare source code in any way."

The same goes for microcode, in fact, he mentions SCO's implementation as an example for a different implementation from the one we find in linux.

I'm not sure about SMP - the article doesn't say whether it derived from SCO's implementation, or it is an entirely separate work...

Re:Oh come on...

[Xtifr]

Be careful how you speak of Linus' daughter's godfather.

If you'll read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll notice that the entire point is that Groklaw has now established these contributors had policy/supervisor approval.

We always knew that Mr. Aivazian contributed to Linux; the new thing that Groklaw has unveiled here is that he can be proven to have been acting as an authorized agent of SCO.

-- Super Ugly Ultraman

Re:Groklaw?

[BootSpooge]

Being as /. links to so many groklaw stories, should they help out with groklaw's bandwidth costs?

Groklaw has a paypal donation button. Give them a few bucks for all the good work.

Re:maddog in the fog

[s20451]

That's why the US government is now the oldest in existence

I don't mean to nitpick, but the last "regime change" in Britain occurred during the 1640-1660 civil wars. The British Parliament is one of the oldest institutions in Europe, dating from the 1200s. True, the nature of the government has changed over time, but fundamentally it is still a monarchy which governs through a parliament.

Re:One question.

[ChrisBrown1]

Actually, SCO does NOT have to show the code "in court" in January. They have to provide it to IBM. There are protective orders in place such that SCO's "secret" code need not be directly disclosed in public. Though, I've yet to figure out why SCO needs such privacy on code they claim most any of us supposedly already have in plain text in /usr/src/linux.

Re:Groklaw?

[MathFox]

Yes, I am the webmaster of GrokLaw and I've taken some measures to serve the Slashdot crowd. We gracefully (Pamela more gracefull than me) accept donations. The bandwidth and servers are provided by Ibiblio, many thanks for that.

Please come to the site; we should be able to handle the Slashdot crowd.

MadDog mistates...

[Seth Cohn]

Hall writes: ".. GPL does not allow a company to take the software created by the sweat and work of another person, add a few lines of code to it and then sell it to make a huge profit."

In fact, the GPL _does_ allow this. There is no restriction in taking a GPLed piece of code, adding lines of code (or not) and then selling it to someone for $X dollars. (1 Jillion Dollars! finger to corner of mouth). In fact, it's completely allowed so long as the buyer recieves the _same_ GPL rights (and source on demand). Why someone would purchase a GPLed product (sans support or other value added) for such an amount is another question, but in fact, a number of people out there do just such a thing, including with code that the original author has changed license terms on and no longer provides GPLed code themselves. Once a GPLed copy is out there, it's out there. Which is a good thing. Despite SCO's claims.

[Major market players such as Mandrake began by 'adding lines of code' to existing products such as Red Hat.]

Re:maddog in the fog

[adrianbaugh]

Interesting. My father (a professional historian who takes interest in such matters) reckons that the oldest administrative region (in terms of borders) in the world is the county of Kent, whose borders are the same as the ancient borders of the kingdom of the Cantii. Its rival used to be certain provinces in China, but those borders got altered under the Maoists.