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Linus Blasts SCO's Header Claims
jonbryce writes "Linus has responded to the latest claims made by SCO in their letter to the Fortune 1000 companies. Basically, he wrote the code himself, and it has been there since Linux 0.0.1. No copying from BSD or any other source." You can also read his comment to the Linux kernel mailing list, which reads in part "I think we can totally _demolish_ the SCO claim that these
65 files were somehow 'copied.' They clearly are not."
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/lin ux-0.01.tar.gz
Next!
Linus' analysis spawned a masterful trolling Subject header on the Yahoo message board for scox: Linus caught - confessing to be ashamed. Nevermind that Linus' shameful confession wasn't copying code, but rather that his Linux 0.01 implementation of ctype wasn't threadsafe. Such beautiful spin. Darl would be proud. :)
And what if the user of the original macro invokes it like this:
char * cp;
if (isdigit(cp++))
do_something();
What then, O wise one?
I thought you were just kidding with this, so I took out the CD-ROM that came with the "LINUX Core Kernel Commentary" book, since it has a 0.01 version for comparison with 2.2.x. The original is definitely not copied and the one from 2.2.10 looks like an incremental change (comments added, new error numbers, but the file itself doesn't look any diffferent).
No.
The "bid price" is the highest amount that any buyer is willing to pay for a stock at a particular time. Likewise, the "ask price" is the lowest amount that any seller is willing to sell the stock for.
So, one particular buyer is asking to buy 100 shares at 4 cents, while one seller is offering to sell 100 shares at $892 each.
Since you're looking at the closing quote, the bid and ask prices are not particularly meaningful. One way to read those numbers is that "all reasonable orders were filled by the end of the day, and the remaining unfilled orders were ridculous (4 cents and $892)."
Note: This is a repost of a comment that I sent to groklaw.
I do have a copy of the Unix source, circa 1988, and I can't see how anyone who knew any C could possibly think that the ctype implementation is copied.
The array has a similar name (_ctype in Linux, a variation on that in Unix). Some of the C macros used to perform each test (see the definition of _U, _L etc in include/linux/ctype.h) have the same names as they do in Unix. Some do not. For example, isdigit() uses _D (for digit) in Linux and but Unix uses a different capital letter. Similarly, _SP in the Linux version has a single-capital-letter name in Unix.
Notably, the order that the macros are defined (and hence their specific bit values) are different.
The implementations are also interestingly different. The specific isxxx() macros, for example, are written in a different way in Linux and in Unix. Unix doesn't use an __ismask()-like macro, preferring to access the array directly.
As Linus pointed out, there are only so many ways to write an ISO-compliant ctype implementation in C. I can see how anyone who didn't know this might think that the Linux code could be copied, but nobody who knew any C could possibly make this mistake.
The most telling difference for me is that the Unix ctype handles EOF, like the ANSI/ISO standard says it should, but the Linux version does not. Why someone would copy the Unix code AND go to the trouble of introducing an incompatibility with the ANSI/ISO standard is one for the lawyers to sort out.
They seem to read LKML, at least.