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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."
If SCO has these files in their OS, is it possible some overzealous SCO programmer stole these files and included them in SCO Unix and re-copyrighted them under SCO's terms?
and SCO is claiming copywrite over them, one can only assume that SCO is using Linus' code.
Could SCO, not the Linux community, be afoul of the copyright laws?
Code under the GPL is still covered by copyright law. In fact without the copyright, the owner of the code would not be able to license the code at all. If SCO is using Linus' code and not abiding by the license under which it was released then they are guilty of cival and possible criminal violations.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
We already knew the entire case was FUD - and now there's a little more evidence, but it's not going to change the perception which SCO has created: that there's something shakey about Open Source.
I don't see this blowing over until SCO is either acquired by IBM or countersued into oblivion...
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
On the other hand, it's kind of entertaining. Like rooting against Johnny Fairplay on Survivor, we tune in every week hoping to finally see SCO get their comeuppance.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
I think we've clearly determined that SCO's claims (at least up till now) are completely baseless to the point of laughability. The problem here is that by Linus and various other open source figures discussing this, it almost gives credibility to their claims.
I think it's time that this nonsense stop...by all means, Linus should talk with the IBM and Novell legal team if he is so inclined, but this is only giving SCO publicity...SCO knows that if they can get their name in the news (even in a negative light), it's still better than fading away...
If news sites refuse to carry SCO's press releases, the whole thing would be moot...
What really need to happen is the courts need to put a gag order on everyone involved with the case...IBM knows where to go if they need more information, but keeping SCO from making any more claims regarding Linux would stop this whole thing in its tracks...I'm not even talking about the validity of their accusations, just that they shouldn't be allowed to keep attacking IBM and the Linux community until they win their case in court...
Boost of stock price? Can't be, what with quartely earnings depressed because of lawyer fees
Name recognition? This is like naming your baby George Bush because it has name recognition
Why then? The only reason I can think of is because they're headed for the gutter anyway, so the executives enrich themselves with a pump and dump. I wonder what SCO shareholders think of this mess
OK folks, now let's be realistic - SCO isn't looking for billions of dollars from "licenses", or even from IBM.
No one would come up with such a poor plan for promoting their product, intellectual property, lawsuit, or anything else.
So what is SCO doing? I think the answer is "Bad Marketing is better than No Marketing". In other words, SCO has nothing to lose.
In SCO's worst case, they end up with nothing. That's just about where they started. Just about every other case is better
Remember when Enron puked on America? What happened? Enron Corporate letterheads were being sold on eBay for a pretty penny! People wanted to BUY this crap because it was associated with the deplorable. And ya know what? SCO can do the same thing and make some serious money and fame.
I wouldn't be surprised if the guys at SCO were secretly selling those "SCO Sucks" t-shirts. It's a great market, and they sell like hotcakes.
humble my ass ... a "mistake" in a work
that is under copyright investigation is
like a gold nugget; that's why the old map
makers would put in mistaken information in
their maps. When the false info turned up in
some competitor's map ... wham.
Linus is setting SCO up for something similar
ummm... Take a look at ctype.h It's just a bunch of #defines like
#define _U 0x01
If sco's best case is that upper and lower limits have been defined the same, they've got a pretty weak case. I don't think looking at the patch history would do anything because there's very little in those files. I would be suprised if some of those were ever changed (except errno as explained by linus). This is a far cry from the SMP code originally claimed by SCO.
http://www.sco.com/company/jobs/
Why do you suppose those jobs are vacant?
Linus Torvalds says:
Perhaps I have an old copy of the standard. Identifiers beginning with an underscore are reserved the compilers and libraries, but I don't see anything about capital letters.
It's not a good idea to use an argument more than once in a macro definition, but there's nothing in the C standard that prohibits it. I've never even met a compiler or preprocessor that warns about it.
Of course, the fact that their quarterly earnings announcement was today has nothing at all to do with it?
Of course not. Don't want to peddle conspiracy theories in here, do we?
Okay, maybe he's not lying, but he ought to check his own code. errno.h was taken from Minix, according to his comments
/*
* ok, as I hadn't got any other source of information about
* possible error numbers, I was forced to use the same numbers
* as minix.
* Hopefully these are posix or something. I wouldn't know (and posix
* isn't telling me - they want $$$ for their f***ing standard).
*
* We don't use the _SIGN cludge of minix, so kernel returns must
* see to the sign by themselves.
*
* NOTE! Remember to change strerror() if you change this file!
*/
Now, Minix was also a homegrown Unix and written completely apart from the AT&T source, so if Linus copied Minix, that's fine.
You can read all 3 or 4 sentences of the Minix license, but I think it's summed up pretty well with: For all practical purposes, MINIX can be treated as if it were in the public domain..
And I haven't even looked at the other files yet.
The ones who put Ken Lay behind bars? The ones regulating mutual funds? The ones regulating stock traders who skim between buy and sell? The ones appointed by an administration who comes from the scratch your back school of croneyism?
They're all prolly taking notes from Darl.
You want SEC to actually do anything? Don't vote Republican next year for any office.
The other problem is that this assumes ASCII encoding. That's why most real implementations do array lookups, e.g.,
#isdigit(x) ((charset[(x)] & DIGIT_MASK) ? 1 : 0)
where 'charset' is actually something that can be specified at boot time.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
sue, maybe not, but subpoenate, requesting to reveal the infriging code, why not?
I personally wonder, how many "close source" companies secretly and illegally include GNU-copyrighted code in their products, and sell it without source, violating GPL, but nobody knows they do, just because nobody ever sees the source.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I haven't seen anyone throw this out, but I'm wondering who is saying that the UNIX and LINUX code is similar?
Clearly it's not an engineer, they wouldn't stoop to this. Any developer worth their weight in RAM would know better - especially with the simple C functions/macros like Linus has pointed out?
Is it possible that there are marking, sales, managers, or even layers going through the code and saying that it's similar because it looks similar to them and they don't know any better?
Will the courts know any better? NO - but rember that SCO has already called on Linus to testify - and he knows better!
No. They claim copyright violation so they have to prove it. Imagine if what you said was true then SCO simply would have to file lots of (bogus) complaints every year and the kernel-hackers would be tied up for the rest of their lives trying to counter the claims. The burden of proof is on SCOs side.
Besides, since the header files contain only facts, there is no copyright value to them.
Ehhr, no.
The more light on this the better. Because so much of *nix is really a standard the more sources for the same code we can dig up the better. Reverse engineering is not illegal (except in US of DMCA perhaps) and is not something to be frightened of. If you can show many examples of this code in a manual or some puplic form it will be very hard not to say impossible for SCO to claim any rights to it. It would be like having copyright on a phonebooks content, ie someone having a copyright on YOUR phone number.
The amount of light on this from the OSS community is something new. Never ever have we seen a case so totally dissected even before it goes to trial. If groklaw keeps this up the IBM laywers can just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Hiding things is for people who have something dark to hide, like Bush.
HTTP/1.1 400
They may have been under some pressure to book the Baystar and RBC investments as revenue, or some other similar "creative accounting" move, to make the 4th quarter look like a gain rather than a loss. And the finance guys said "No way do I want to share a cell with the Enron guys! I quit!".
You mods are dopes -- here let me spell it out:
First OP mentions charcoal, a weird reference to Abe Lincoln.
Then a small floating rock and duck are both Monty Python Holy Grail references.
Then Simpsons references (onion, comely cousins, Springfield/Shelbyville)
Then Peanuts, Linus & Snoopy. Linus takes his code.
A programming language called Sea (C) taken by two men Kernighan and Ritchie.
And a rolly-ma-jig called a rat is a mouse with a slight Mr. Burns reference.
The whole thing is like a Forrest Gumpish.
It's a joke have a sense on humor.
Looks like they won't fool everyone this time:
Creator of Linux Defends Its Originality
also:
Novell Registers Unix Copyrights
Wasn't just the old map makers. Printers who calculated and printed tables of logarithms, trig functions, and other assorted ilk would do the same thing in order to be able to sue competitors who copied their books.
FreeSpeech.org
SCO keeps talking about the "ABI". It appears that they are not claiming copyright on the headers themselves, but on the general kind of interface those headers specify. Whether Linus looked at BSD or SysV headers is then immaterial.
It's not clear that something that general is copyrightable--they seem to be fishing. But keep in mind that movie plots have been defended using copyright law, so it's possible.
The real problem is that SCO had to pick a part of the Linux system that actually was similar to their UNIXes. After all, any number of people have access to the code that SCO is saying IBM put into Linux. If they picked something that was obviously bogus then IBM (or Novell) could simply call their bluff. Since no such beast exists SCO simply had to pick a part of the Linux kernel that had to be similar to their UNIX (because there was no other way to write it).
SCO's lie does not have to be terribly convincing. After all, what they really are doing is trying to drive their stock price up, and almost no investors have a clue about UNIX history or copyright law. So SCO simply has to float a big lie and then rely on Microsoft and Sun (and the many analysts and journalists that have a vested interest in derailing Free Software) to act as if the lie was somewhat credible. SCO has said all sorts of crazy things in the press, and people that should know better are acting as if SCO actually has a point.
Since SCO isn't actually trying to win the case (instead they are simply trying to drag it out so that they can dump their shares without getting targetted by the SEC), they can say whatever they want in the press. IBM, Novell, and Red Hat, on the other hand are actually trying to win their respective cases and they know that things that they say in public can be used against them in court. These companies know that the proper place to do your talking is in court. Linus apparently doesn't care that his comments could run him into legal trouble down the road (well, he already had been subpoenaed).
It's not a question of whether his statements are legal or not. You can say whatever dumb thing you want, whenever you want. The problem is that Linus' words can now be considered "evidence," and they can be used against him in a court of law.
For example, he is now on the record stating that he wrote the original version of these files, but that these files are now different than the originals that he wrote. That may seem innocuous, but who knows what SCO might want to prove in a court of law. Any way you look at it he is making SCO's life easier by pointing out possible flaws in their case.
No, the trick when you have legal difficulties is to say as little as possible, and to never say anything without legal counsel going over the angles.
How can they include things like the correct errno.h for Linux into their closed source binaries without being in copyright violation? Remember that several of the Linux i386 values aren't POSIX compliant so SCO can't say they used the standards.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Quoting Linus in the Article:
;)
:
d efine toupper(c) (_ctmp=c,islower(_ctmp)?_ctmp+('A'-'a'):_ctmp)
For example, SCO lists the files "include/linux/ctype.h" and
"lib/ctype.h", and some trivial digging shows that those files are
actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux (ie September of
1991). And I can state
- I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed:
the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I
wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else
claimed to have done so
Quoting Linus in ctype,h, linux 0.0.1
#define tolower(c) (_ctmp=c,isupper(_ctmp)?_ctmp+('a'+'A'):_ctmp)
#
-><- no