Slashdot Mirror
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."
One can't help but feel a warm fuzzy sense of nostalgia looking back over the history of Unix, even if a fair number of us geeks here are younger than Unix (er, UNICS) itself.
UNICS was released nearly 40 years ago...and it's legacy still lives on. It'll take more than the likes of SCO (and a dotted green line) to tear down the Open-Source community. Long live geeks.
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!
This enitre issue is moot. SCO distributed copies of linux under the GPL. Thus, if they owned the code, they GPLed it. End of story. It's silly to talk about it. They have already released their copyright. That is the final, and only important issue.
Arrg!
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
Inform me if I'm wrong, but didn't Linus make Linux because he didn't like Minix?
Help Fight SPAM today!
They have already released their copyright.
They can't release what they don't own. Since it appears that Novell owns the copyrights, SCO may be elligible for a lawsuit for unlawful disclosure of copyrighted material to the public. This is yet another can of worms, and we would have to hope that since Novell just bought SuSe (with the help of IBM) that this would not cause other problems with code SCO contributed before it became evil.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
No, because the guy who made this link, Ken Brown, intentionally ignored multiple sources of information that Linux was *not* derived from Linux. It was totally untrue, and he knew it because:
-
Tanenbaum, who wrote Minix, told him so.
-
The guy Ken Brown hired to find where Linux took from Minix told him that it had not in fact happened, after analysing the code.
There never was *any* plausible support for Brown's case and he knew it *befire* making PR announcements, but he went ahead anyhow."that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
...a Microsoft-sponsored IDC telephone survey a couple of days ago did still ask me if "the SCO litigation" was one of the reasons I use Linux.
I said "Yes", of course, since I'd use Linux on principle if I hadn't been already when extortionists like TSG (The Sco Group) sued them. If they turn and sue someone like the NetBSD project, I'd find a place in my organisation for a NetBSD box as well.
For the curious, IDC called from Malaysia into Australia, and "Brian" (no idea if that's his real name) said that IDC were planning on setting up their main Asia-Pacific offices there.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Emphasis is not mine.
Thus is, an arrow does not imply that Linux's source code is derived from Minix. It only implies that, in some way, the functionality may be compatible with Minix. Source code is not the only criteria for an arrow.
... made Linus admit that Santa Claus wrote Linux, everything is settled...
Linux cames from North Pole and this is it...
Ha!
how long until
...if we had some eggs."
It's just like that old joke. If Linux came from Minix, and if Minix came from Unix, then SCO might have some eggs. But since Linux didn't come from Minix and Minix didn't come from Unix, SCO has shit.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If you examine Eric's original chart, you will see that this relationship between Linux, Minix, and Unix exists even there. SCO has simply made it obvious to see, and called the chart a sort of "pedigree" to suggest that Linux contains actual Unix "genetic" material.
Of course, Eric states very clearly on his site that "an arrow indicates an inheritance like a compatibility, it is not only a matter of source code"
And anyway, Minix doesn't contain any AT&T source code by Tanenbaum's own admission. Linux doesn't contain Minix code. These are both original works, influenced by the Unix flavor of their time. That is what the Levenez chart shows, nothing more.
The chart is only useful to SCO in their campaign of dishonesty to suggest something that is clearly untrue, and that has been proved repeatedly to be untrue.
Try suing the BSD distros instead?
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?
Minix became outdated after Unix went down in price and instead became used in the academia environment to teach students how an OS works. It never really was finished and the internet really did not exist like today without a WWW. Mainly just a few newsgroup and a tiny number of FTP sites which made working on Minix difficult.
BSD on the other hand has plenty of more merit.
It is a direction descendant of SysIII with some bits of SysV unixware code added in.
All the offending code has been removed today but FreeBSD 1.x and early builds of NetBSD had the Unix in it. THis is why FreeBSD compatiblity only goes back to 2.x and not the 1.x series based on NET/2.
They are a descendant of SysIII from the late 70's since this was used for early BSD development.
Since the deal was sealed we dont really know what happened or what the terms were with the current BSD's. IBM wants to find out.
Someone please feel free to correct me if I am wrong since I may be ingorant in this subject area. I want to know.
http://saveie6.com/
- 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
The whole point is not to make legal sense but to keep enough bafflement in there to confuse the "investors" and keep them hoping that there is still some reason why SCO stock should not be printed on toilet paper.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...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
that timeline reminds me of some photos I saw at MOMA here in NYC of spiderwebs made by spiders that had been given doses of LSD.
wish I had a link.
What would happen if John Carmack decided to program an operating system from scratch? Is his specialty 3D engines, or does he have the talent required to build an OS?
Reply below
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.
If those gaudy rasters can be believed, SCO believes that Minix is an offshoot of Sinix, and not merely an imitator of UTS Version 7. On some high resolution versions (PS) of the chart, Levenez's intentions seem clear-- the path from UTS V7 merely crosses over the descendency of Sinix. But, of course, if we had access to the original framemaker document, we could ascertain Levenez's intent quite easily (*). It might also be possible to rebuild the structure of the plot from the postscript rendering.
(*) or we could just ask him.
The crucial flaw in this reasoning is that it assumes SCO's graphs and charts and piles of bullshit have been actually read by Ken Brown, or read by SCO's own lawyers for that matter.
Everything about SCO's suit, and Microsoft's supplimentary PR, is a smokescreen. Trying to find logic or reason in this smokescreen is no different in any way than pointing at clouds and going "hey, that one looks like a bird".
I think the interesting thing about this is that it is a brand new offensive from SCO. We should have known this was coming when we saw the BS from Ken Brown claiming that Linux had Minix source in it. This shows that SCO has run out of plausible claims and is now making up really silly stuff that has already been refuted.
If anything, this shows that SCO is not going away merely because they don't have a case. The will keep grinding away as long as they have funding.
They may not have been aware of the violation at the time they initially distributed the GPLed code. In that case they get to hide behind this "doctrine of mutual mistake" or whatever it's called.
However, they certainly were aware of the violation at the time they filed their lawsuit against IBM. And they knowingly and consciously continued to distribute Linux as a product for some time, and from their website for at least eight months, after this. Any protections they might have potentially had they simply threw away by doing this.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Anything prior to 1991 is not Linux, actually.
I guess it really depends on what you call a Unix timeline, and what you call SCO intellectual property. Of course it wasn't their intellectual property at the time, but it is now since they changed the contracts on everyone. IBM didn't think that they could change the contracts, and see what happened.
They sued Daimler Chrysler for not giving them the serial numbers of processors that used to run UNICOS 1.0 or something similar (UNICOS 1.0 apparently always shipped with source)- for Cray supercomputers that vary in processing power from approximately 0.25 gigaflops to 1 gigaflop. No one keeps museum pieces that old around, there is no point in doing so, especially when the point of having those computers in the first place was for their supercomputing abilities.
It's not a Unix timeline if they use it like that; they are basically saying that "Linux" has its "roots" in stuff prior to 1991, but that "SCO Linux", whatever that is supposed to mean, is anything from 1991 forward.
The whole point is this: whatever it is that SCO are doing, they are doing things that will more than likely fail. Expecting an organization to keep records of a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the mid-eighties that has approximately 1/60th the floating-point processing power of a single-processor G5 at 2.0 Ghz and the equivalent of 64 megs of ram is a little bit on the funny side, I seriously doubt that any organization would have the floor space to keep a computer like that around just for the sake of licensing purposes. How many of us wrote legal documents to Microsoft cancelling our EULAs when we stopped using Windows 3.0, or say, for instance, how many universities wrote documents to Sun Microsystems every time they retired an IPX or a Sparcstation 1+ or perhaps something even older than that? It's just so you can say "We are suing this prominent company for something that, when you look more closely at it, is never going to fly, but we realize that most people won't look at it that closely or understand it that thoroughly, so it will, in the end, have the desired effect.
Anything prior to approximately 1991 is not Linux, so again, it's not relevant.
It does explain what \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}, is though, - \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\} would be Linux (post-1991).
Anything prior to that is not Linux, so it's not \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}.
SCO is basically saying that because they distributed Linux at some point under the GPL, and because the GPL is not valid in their opinion, that because they contributed to it, and because they hold some sort of UNIX rights, that they own Linux. That's really what they are saying, it has nothing to do with Minix, that's just a coincidence.
Of course, they won't get away with it. They know that, the lawyers know that, we know that. The real question is WHY are they doing it? That's the question. The answer to that question is known by those who need to know.
SCO simply doesn't understand the difference between a timeline and a family tree.
SCO is starting to scare me. They may have a chance of convincing a judge they have rights over Linux.
Why? The problem is that Linux might be considered to be derived from a reverse-engineering of Minix, and that the reverse-engineering wasn't done "cleanroom" style.
Just as an example: When companies like NEC and AMD started producing x86-compatible processors, they went through a procedure designed to isolate them from being accused of copying Intel's work. Two teams were formed: One team's job was to analyze the processor and write a detailed specification of the Intel processor's operation; they passed this data to the second team, which designed a new processor to meet those specifications. The second team could ask the first team to clarify information, but in any case, all communications between the teams were kept minimal and were logged, in order to prove Intel's IP wasn't stolen. Intel sued anyway, but the audit trails kept Intel from proving its cases.
Now the question becomes, did Linus have access to Minix's source code while he was writing Linux? Did he ever look at Minix's source code to determine how it behaved? There was no separate team writing the specification. Linus can't prove a negative, unless he can rightly claim he'd never had access to Minix's source. But a civil court doesn't base its decision on absolutes, and a good lawyer might convince the court that Linus did incorporate intellectual property from Minix.
A modern web browser
- is OS-like in complexity, but less silly hardware tying is necessary
- poses interesting crossplatform targetting compatibility issues, such as those Carmack faces when writing his game engines
- like a game, requires rendering of very large, complex, and dynamic graphic objects, and this must be done in an efficient and quick manner-- something current web browsers tend to be bad at, DHTML animations rarely look smooth
- poses interesting optimization questions for these dynamic graphics, much like an Id game
- like an Id game, must perform complex network operations efficiently
- requires the efficient parsing and execution of text files, much like the maps and interpreted-c mods for Quake 3
- like Id game engines, must expose an external development interface for plugins and embedding
Gecko, KHTML and MSIE are great browsers in many ways, but they pretty much all suffer from the fact that DHTML/flash/SVG or (God forbid) VRML all behave in rather inefficient, obnoxious, and (well) gimmicky manners. They don't feel like they're integrated with the web pages. They CERTAINLY don't feel like something you could do serious application development with (remember back when DHTML was first being proposed and people seemed to be under the impression complex and high-level applications would target web browsers?) I would like to see someone with a background in game development take a crack at these issues, as these issues seem very similar to the problem game engine designers must solve.For the moment however it appears Mr. Carmack's spare time project is trying to build a spaceship, so maybe we'll have to wait.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
HURTS. My eyes won't stop crossing.
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
It's not why it's being done. Apparently some individuals feel that by generating this type of to-do, that some greater purpose is being served. This has everything to do with greedy, misguided individuals within large (or not so large) organizations who have somehow decided that they can obtain great wealth by looking in dark corners of closets or attics, etc. That's what I think.
The whole thing is being "reverse-engineered". The "desired outcome" is a lawsuit, so whatever it takes to produce one is what takes place. Normally, the lawsuit is the means by which another desired outcome is produced. In this case, the "desired outcome" is/are the lawsuit(s), because this is about individuals within organizations obtaining promotions or "finding valuables in attics", or something like that.
This is what happens sometimes within large (or perhaps, sometimes, not so large) organizations - a few individuals wielding great power, looking to improve their status in the world, stab and fumble and grope in the dark, searching for their own private monetary nirvana, unable to settle for a salary and job security that "ain't broke".
This is not good for Microsoft the company; it's not good for Microsoft the company's reputation; perhaps sometime soon someone representing Microsoft the company will step forward and proclaim this whole thing an unhelpful distraction, which is exactly what it is.
I think every one of us has worked with an individual or two who had their own selfish interests placed ahead of their coworkers and the company itself. How much more tempting might it be, working amongst (or for) one of the wealthiest individuals in the US, if not the world? Let's face it... Microsoft is a legend, and Microsoft will always be a legend. Microsoft can have a bright future, Microsoft should have a bright future. It's as plain and simple as that. What is really needed here is another Lee Iacocca, another Jack Welch, etc... people like this are out there, and they do exist. But money talks, and being around it changes you - it takes a very, very strong individual to be able to turn down the prospect of an early retirement to do the right thing. What, with the patents and all, who wouldn't want to just go to some tropical island and never have to worry about this nonsense again? Perhaps one day when someone who truly has a passion for quality products, whether they be hardware or software, when someone who has true leadership abilities, and can inspire people to produce tip-top products - I believe there will be such a day, and I believe there will be such a person, but a little patience will be required - but when this day comes, I think that we should all try to get out there and welcome Microsoft back into the real world. It would be a good thing, sort of like a long-lost friend or something. The changes that will be necessary will happen, and the negativity and FUD will stop, it's just going to take the right person to bring this about.
Malicious prosecution?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Linux Kernel Personality actually. I wonder if they modified GPL'd source code and did not return the modifications. If so, further reason for them to dispute the validity of GPL. I had that version of Unixware and it did run some Linux binaries (I wiped that hard disk, shredded the CDs and the license and no longer support that OS, that's what SCO wanted, isn't it?).
Simple. FUD.
SCO, Baystar, RBC, Microsoft, EV1, Laura Dildo - all of them have been paid, hired, pimped or coherced into making some kind of statement to obfuscate the SCO plight as a whole for the past year and a whatever. The latest round with Ken brown and his alleged minix issues are just more of the same "Paid Advertising" bullshit that SCO and their Redmond investor buddies have been purchasing to try and confuse everyone.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Source: Google
It is important that trees like this are not meant to show what
derives from what, in terms of code. Unix has clearly inspired
Minix, as Tanenbaum has said many times, so one might draw links.
There is no code sharing though.
Linus wrote Linux on Minix, and because he wanted a free Minix,
first versions were to some degree inspired by minix. So again
a link can certanly be drawn. No code sharing even here, as stated by
Tanenbaum and Linus though.
Damn it, you guys, it's Minix!! Not Minux, not Munix ... Minix!
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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).
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.