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SCO Lists Specific Code-Infringement Claims
mugnyte writes "Those tireless folks at groklaw have transcribed and published the documents from the latest IBM/SCO hearing. In it, the exact lines of the supposed Dynix / AIX / Linux logic are given. SCO claimed that Linux's read copy update, journaling file system, enterprise volume management system, AIO (Asynchronous I/O), and "scatter gather" I/O code had been derived from either AIX or Dynix/ptx. Now we can take a look at what SCO thinks makes Linux an enterprise-ready platform started at 2.4, stealing away their market share. However, IBM released these things under the GPL ... so what license did IBM really have from SCO to do this? Which raises the question, What license did SCO have from Novell to disallow this?"
Thanks to the tireless people at Groklaw for doing this, and thanks to SCO for finally telling us what they are on about.
Is the code SCO's? Yeah, probably.
The question is whether or not they ever gave explicit or implicit go ahead to release the code under GPL. They can probably claim that the license to which IBM agreed may have been generous but at the time of drafting it could not be foreseen that IBM would put the code effectually in the public domain. Such a move would essentially neuter SCO's copyright, something to which they could never have accepted nor meant as a licensing condition.
My guess is that the 2.4 kernel will probably be done away with altogether unless some enterprising coder took it upon himself to rewrite all those portions. 2.6 is out now without those infringements, so I expect that most people will simply migrate towards that instead of using the older 2.4 kernel.
Heh, this may even give Debian some incentive to bring themselves up to date with the rest of the Linux community.
I have been pwned because my
It IS theft. It's theft of intellectual property. There are laws on this.
I don't know why Slashdotters keep arguing this. It's clearly defined by the law. If you obtain something without paying for it, it doesn't matter that the medium happens to allow a direct copy of it. It's irrelevant.
But Slashdotters want anything to shove in the RIAA's face as "wrong," ignoring the real issue of people downloading artists' music without paying them for it. It doesn't matter to them.
That can't be right. According to this theory, someone in an exceptionally high position - say President of the USA would be ...oh, never mind.