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."

Comments

simple...

[Pharmboy]

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"...

Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix?

[Pharmboy]

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.

You missed a few!

[leonbrooks]

• 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.

Minix is for teaching

[mflaster]

Tanenbaum didn't write Minix to be a competitor to Unix - he wanted to use it primarily for teaching. See here.

Years later, I was teaching a course on operating systems and using John Lions' book on UNIX Version 6. When AT&T decided to forbid the teaching of the UNIX internals, I decided to write my own version of UNIX, free of all AT&T code and restrictions, so I could teach from it.

He even said that he rejected many patches from people trying to make it more "useable", because he wanted it to remain simple enough to teach from.

Mike

Re:Minux had no unix code

[LardBrattish]

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.

Was This Not Obvious?

[LuYu]

Ken Brown in an email message to Dennis Ritchie:

3) In my opinion, you wrote Unix (UNICS) from scratch. In my opinion, Linus Torvalds did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he write? I talked to a Finnish programmer that insists that Linus had the Unix code (the Lyon's Book) and Minix code. Without those two, who could not have even come close to writing Linux. I hate to ask such a bare-knuckle question, but I really feel that this part of history is very gray. [Empasis mine]

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).

Long live FreeBSD

[thejuggler]

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