Randall Davis: IBM Has No SCO Code

Mick Ohrberg writes "As reported by Groklaw, Randall Davis, renowned professor of Computer Science at MIT has after an extensive search found no evidence of SCO's claims that IBM has incorporated parts of the Unix System V code. Davis says "Accordingly, the IBM Code cannot be said, in my opinion, to be a modification or a derivative work based on the Unix System V Code." Surprised, anyone?"

Comments

Re:Finally...

[erick99]

So now, after months and months of news about this trial, it's all over now ?

Since Dr. Randall Davis is an expert witness for IBM, I am guessing that SCO will say, "ain't so!" and then they will ask for time to refute Randall's findings and perhaps come up with an expert witness of their own that finds thousands of "matches." Hopefully the judge in this case will recognize Randall for the expert that he is and accept his findings. However, that just doesn't seem likely to me. This is just another round in a case that will continue like this ad nauseum.

Erick

Counterexample DIY

[hummassa]

1. Get Linux 2.6.8.1
2. Get Linux 2.4.0
3. left out as an exercise for the reader
4. Show positive result
5. Don't profit, but have fun.

Re:Counter example would have helped.

[mindstrm]

He doesn't need to; the software in question has probably been used many times before for the exact same thing.

Everyone is getting so far off base on this.

SCO is manging to convince people that this is somehow difficult to prove.. that they need more research and more time to PROVE that IBM stole code and put it in linux. Their only claim as to why they think Linux has SCO code is "because there is no way linux could have become as good as it did without stealing from us".. ie: denial

They have yet to show ONE section of code that was lifted. They haven't even shown how one was *similar* enough to have potentially been stolen and heavily modified.. they have shown *NOTHING*

IT's called an expert witness... and their word DOES mean something to the court.. they stake their reputation on it.

Formal Request to Randall Davis

[HopeOS]

Although your deposition includes a description of your methodology, it does not indicate whether you established a proper baseline for comparison or how you calibrated your filter. I would be interested to know how far, in your direct experience, code can be modified before it fails to match COMPARATOR and SIM respectively. Furthermore, how closely does the point at which these tools fail to detect a match coincide with the legal Abstraction, Filtration, and Comparison test?

I do not fault your analysis; I would like to know more about your methodology, beyond the limited scope of the deposition.

-Hope

Re:Counter example would have helped.

[darkonc]

I'm sure they will jump on the fact that the expert didn't provide an example of a true derivative work run through the same procedure.

It just hit me: He doesn't have to. It's SCO's responsibility to show that there is infringing code in Linux. It's not IBM's responsibility to show that there is none. All that Davis has to prove is that the search is feasible in a reasonable ammount of time (as opposed to SCO's claim of 25,000 man-years). He's done this admirably. Not being able to find anything is simply icing on the cake.

One beautiful thing about this is that (AFAICT) all (or almost all) of the software he used seems to be Open source (although he has references some similar commercial software), so SCO has absolutely no excuse to not repeat his experiment and come up with different results (presuming that they've actually got a case), given that it takes about 1 hour to run the comparison on off-the-shelf hardware.

The other beautiful thing about this is -- remember Darl's remarks about an MIT team deep-diving the code?...... (boot to the head!)
"I've shown you mine, now you show me yours!"