SCO Claims Linux Lifted ELF

fymidos writes "SCO has finally spoken. According to this linuxworld article, they claim that linux illegally uses the ELF binary format, the JFS filesystem, the init code and some more 'copyrighted Unix header and interfaces'. Finally SCO makes its move. The JFS part was expected of course, but according to the article, as far as the ELF format is concerned 'the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard' and 'granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff'. Oh, and of course 'both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee'."

Comments

Re:Can we have some details on the JSF

[AlanWay]

From http://oss.software.ibm.com/jfs/ in their FAQ

Q1. What is the history of the source based use for the port of JFS for Linux.

A1. IBM introduced its UNIX file system as the Journaled File System (JFS)
with the initial release of AIX Version 3.1. This file system, now
called JFS1 on AIX, has been the premier file system for AIX over the
last 10 years and has been installed in millions of customer's AIX
systems. In 1995, work began to enhance the file system to be more
scalable and to support machines that had more than one
processor. Another goal was to have a more portable file system,
capable of running on multiple operating systems.

Historically, the JFS1 file system is very closely tied to the memory
manager of AIX. This design is typical of a closed-source operating
system, or a file system supporting only one operating system.

The new Journaled File System, on which the Linux port was based, was
first shipped in OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness in April, 1999, after
several years of designing, coding, and testing. It also shipped with
OS/2 Warp Client in October, 2000. In parallel to this effort, some
of the JFS development team returned to the AIX Operating System
Development Group in 1997 and started to move this new JFS source base
to the AIX operating system. In May, 2001, a second journaled file
system, Enhanced Journaled File System (JFS2), was made available for
AIX 5L. In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS
source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.

So, the original JFS-1 was written as closed source for AIX. However, the JFS that made its way into Linux was JFS-2, which was originally written for OS/2 then ported to AIX and Linux.

Dunno how SCO can claim code written for OS/2 :-)

ELF licence/standard

[Anonymous Coward]

The ELF Standard says:

"The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby."

Now that's pretty damn clear indication that anyone is allowed to use this license.

So how does SCO own this again? Oh, right, unlike IBM, Microsoft, Intel and the other members of the TIS committee, their business model is to sue! Ok, sorry, my fault.

Re:Time to move to Mach-o

[pjrc]

Obviously you don't remember the bad old days of Linux a.out. It's not about the binary applications... it's about the libraries.

Under a.out, each library had to be assigned a memory location. Back in the old days, there was a long list of official assignments that you could download from sunsite and the other major ftp sites. There were three major problems.

1. New libraries had to obtain an "official" memory range allocation if they were to be distributed to a wide audience. I never compiled any shared libs back then, but I'm sure someone around here must remember who was in charge of the official memory allocation list.
2. Revisions to a library had to fit within the space they had been allocated. Add too much code, and all of a sudden your shared library may overlap a range reserved for some other library.
3. Because liberal amounts of extra memory were allocated to each library to allow code size to grow, memory was allocated inefficiently.

Obviously, this wasn't scalable.

thefreedictionary.com

[Stormie]

Please do not post links to thefreedictionary.com - they are a dodgy site which repackages Wikipedia content whilst stretching the GFDL as far as they possibly can.

Look at that link you posted - you'll see a credit to Wikipedia at the bottom. Now disable javascript in your browser and refresh - ooh, the credit is gone! They insert it in with javascript rather than putting it in the body of the page to ensure that Google doesn't pick it up. Why? Because a link to Wikipedia's article would help lift Wikipedia's pagerank above that of freedictionary.com.

Just say no, and if you want to read Wikipedia's timeline of Linux development, read the original.

Re:Time to move to Mach-o

[dolmant_php]

Actually, OpenBSD moved to ELF (for many archs) in 3.4.

Re:More school yard fun

[enjo13]

Just FYI: "Substantially similiar" is a legally valid term that is suggesting that the code is a derivative work of the SCO code.

In order to violate copyright they don't need to be identical copies. Instead they need to show that they are substantially similiar (there it is) to each other, implying that the Linux version is derived from the original SCO code. At what point something stops being a derived work is a whole different mess...

One common example of this type of copyright dispute is in housing floorplans and architecture. Often someone will see a floorplan they like in a magazine (copyrighted), and move a few things around and have blueprints drawn from that. That's an infringement on the original copyright, because the resulting work is really just a derived form of the original.

SCO's claims fail on a number of levels, but your 'analysis' is more or less incorrect.