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Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link?
ansak writes "In the latest scoop from Groklaw, Groklaw user talks_to_birds pointed out an error in SCO's version of the famous Levenez Unix Timeline. The important error is the green dotted line which shows Minix to be a derivative of Unix. If this were accepted, and if Linux was shown to be a derivative of Minix, then SCO's lawsuits would be more likely to have merit. As it turned out, even MS called Samizdat unhelpful, but at least now there may be a plausible reason why someone would try to make the link between Minix and Linux in the first place."
They are trying to bolster their claims that Linux came from Minix, which came from the same source as Sinix, which is their code.
Actually, if you just go to Groklaw, they have tons of really good info on this, instead of just AC comments. Including links to the SCO chart showing how Linux is linked off of "SCO Linux"...
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
He made linux for two reasons, from what I have read: He didn't like the limitations of Minix. He didn't like the license of Minix. Minix was designed to be a limited teaching tool, and cost like 70-80 bucks a license. He worked on a Minix box when he first started, until he could get .1 kernel up enough to boot.
I think Minix was completely from scratch as well, and not fully POSIX, but close enough. The author of Minix is and was a college professor, whose sole motivation was to make a teaching tool (and appearantly make a few bucks to cover costs I guess...)
I also think that Linus began using the GNU/GPL within a year of starting the project.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
- Andy told him so several times.
- Bruce Perens, editor of the Prentice Hall series cited by Brown, told him so.
- Robert Swartz, founder of Mark Williams Co, authors of Coherent, also told him so.
- Ilkka Tuomi and several other scientists and historians told him so.
- Richard Stallman told him so too.
- No less than Dennis Ritchie told him so.
There's a reasonably complete linkfarm on GrokLaw, of course, and even more complete derivative at WikiPedia, including gems from their tobacco-whore days.Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...they own everything. Just look at that blatant yellow line labelled Unixware Pedigree that starts on the left.
So why haven't they picked on the other 'derivatives' in the diagram? Surely it should be an all or nothing argument, not a 'pick the ones you want to fight' affair?
"SCO Darl Mcbride == IBM Scarred clod"
Mike
I read in the Linux journal a few years ago that Minux was formed because AT&T wanted to charge $30,000 per cpu for sysV! Talk about extortion! Minux was formed as a result but was never updated when Bell labs lowered the price and allowed other people to make versions of Unix like Sun and SGI. Unless I am wrong?
Not strictly wrong Minix was written by one person, college professor Andy Tannenbaum, in order to teach Operating System design to students and be able to give them a real example to work with. Obviously paying $30,000/CPU for a student is not feasible so that was probably part of the motivation but being able to show a fully functional operating system was the main reason. Minix is sold with a book. It was never an open source project in the way we now know & love. Andy didn't apply patches regularly and didn't want to overburden the core of MINIX because it would reduce its' value as a teaching tool. Hence people became frustrated and LINUX was born.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Minix! Minix, Minix, Minix! Minux? Minix!
Ken Brown in an email message to Dennis Ritchie:
This was a question Ken Brown asked while interviewing for his book. He obviously made his decision before he asked any questions at all.Tannenbaum also said that Ken Brown had not read any of the available books on the history of Unix. It looks like AdTI and SCO are working together on this. Then again, maybe SCO is just grabbing at straws tossed out by AdTI. Either way, this has to be targeted at the ignorant (read: politicians).
The funny thing is that these "theories" do not take into account the classic and widely known Linux anecdote which was Linus' very motivation for writing Linux: He did not even have working MINIX binaries when he wrote Linux because he had accidently overwritten his harddrive. So, he had two choices: buy MINIX again or write his own OS. That is a far cry from having possession of the MINIX source code.
Final Note: It is not like the Linux kernel was doing 3D graphics back then. It was a text based console with disc access. I doubt Ken Brown or SCO would have called it an operating system back then (this is not to say it was not amazing, just that these mud slingers cannot imagine a non GUI system -- they are lawyers, after all).
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Minix pre-dates the POSIX standard.
Actually, it is pretty interesting.
SCO nor anyone else can target FreeBSD anymore. Berkeley Software Design Inc.(creators of BSD/386 and BSD/OS) and the creator of FreeBSD (U of C, Berkeley) and were sued by AT&T back in 1992. All was settled out of court and the result was FreeBSD had to be moved to a new code base (4.4BSD-Lite Source Code) free of AT&T licences before FreeBSD could move on in life.
Another note: back in 1992, AT&T sold the portion of the company that made their UNIX (UNIX Systems Laboratories - USL) to Novell, Inc.
SOURCE: The Complete FreeBSD 3rd Edition by Greg Lehey
And interestingly enough, the Amiga OS also grew out of a teaching system--the Tripos OS, written at Cambridge by people including Professor Martin Richards, who invented BCPL and worked at Bell Labs with Kernighan and Richie... who were inspired by BCPL when designing C.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
As someone who used 2.2 for quite some time and was quite happy with it I can say without qualification......
"Shut the fuck up, dickeater. You don't have any idea what the fuck you're talking about, do you?"
Don't get me wrong, 2.4 was a quantum leap...but Linux (and GNU, right...) was a very useful system long before that. If you'd have used it, you'd know that.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Malicious prosecution?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's pretty hard to be convicted of perjury. It has to be proven that you KNEW what you were saying was in fact not true AND your false testimony was material to the court case.
The punishments are pretty stiff. The problem is enforcement is usually limited to someone the system wants to bring down, rather than those who are playing it like a cheap guitar.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Damn it, you guys, it's Minix!! Not Minux, not Munix ... Minix!
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Your post doesn't make much sense to me.
When Linux came out it needed a MINIMUM of a '386. In fact, that was one of Linus's main motivations -- Tanenbaum had refused to create a '386-based version of Minux, insisting that most students could only afford a '286-based machine. At the same point in time, BSD 2.X ran on PDP-11/70's with less than a megabyte of main memory -- and unlike the '386, the PDP-11 was entirely a 16-bit machine and didn't have demand paging. "Minicomputers" were already on the way out when Linux and 386BSD appeared since the chief performance differences between a mini and the '386's were (1) data-center grade peripherals and (2) a price tag more than an order of magnitude larger.
Of course, the 2.X series of BSD Unix was a dead end (who wants 16-bit Unix based on a platform that was EOL'd nearly twenty years ago?), but it shows that BSD once ran with resources that are probably quite a bit less than the average PDA of today.
To make this a little closer to the article's topic: the ABI of Bell Labs Unix was so widely known (and not just via the Lions book -- it's all in the man pages) that neither Tanenbaum nor Linus needed any knowledge of Unix internals whatsoever to replicate it. Furthermore, substantially all the details of those internals were published in Bell System Technical Journal articles and elsewhere. This is why the court found in the USL vs. Regents (BSD) suit that the cat was already out of the bag.
further, there are other instances of solid lines in the original (maintained by the SCO version) that don't indicate common source code. Plan 9, for example, is shown to be a fork off Research Unix v8. at best this is an "inspired by" type of link, as not only is there no code, but the counter-example of "compatibility" doesn't even hold up - they weren't.
i'm also not sure the placement of the fork is accurate - i think it should fork off some time between v9 and v10, but i'm seeking confirmation - but that's not really relevant.
the point is the chart's just being used as a nice visual aid for SCO - the "link" is entirely their own fabrication.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Just a minor nit: "most time zones"?
UTC aka GMT (close enough for us mere mortals anyway) aka zulu time is the time at the greenwich meridian, 0 longitude, and the international date line is at 180 longitude. If I'm not mistaken that would put roughly half the time zones before and half after UTC (at least there should be the same number (+/- 1) of whole-hour time zones on either side of UTC, I think there are a few time zones with fractional-hour offsets).
When I served my turn at jury duty for my city, I was amazed at how quickly everything went. And it was for a murder trial.
The prosecutor told us that murder trials in our jurisdiction usually take a day. Those epic murder trials are reserved for media circus venues like L.A.
Sure enough, we were all wrapped up right after lunch, with DNA expert testimony and everything.
I would have never guessed I would be picked for the jury--white male, whose step father is in law enforcement. With a black male defendant.
Anyways the guy was found not guilty, the prosecution wasn't able to prove anything other than the guy's blood was on the head of the wrench clutched by the victim's dead hand. You need a lot more than that to prove murder, so the judge dismissed the case.
The author of Minix (which he wrote from scratch by himself) said that Linux (the kernel) may look and act a lot like Minix and have been inspired by Minix (Minix was specifically written to be used as a teaching tool so it isn't surprising that an OS would resemble its functionality), but that it is a completely different design. Actually, he slams Linus for making it monolithic and said he should have listened more in class...ha.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Kernhigan didn't write the initial version of UNICS. You're thinking of Ken Thompson. Kernighan co-wrote C with Dennis Ritchie.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy