The Score is IBM - 700,000 / SCO - 326

The Peanut Gallery writes "After years of litigation to discover what, exactly, SCO was suing about, IBM has finally discovered that SCO's 'mountain of code' is only 326 scattered lines. Worse, most of what is allegedly infringing are comments and simple header files (like errno.h). These probably aren't copyrightable for being unoriginal and dictated by externalities and aren't owned by SCO in any event. Above and beyond that, IBM has at least five separate licenses for these elements, including the GPL, even if SCO actually owned those lines of code. In contrast IBM is able to point out 700,000 lines of code, which they have properly registered copyrights for, which SCO is infringing upon if the Court rules that it repudiated the GPL."

Comments

Re:Linus says he wrote errno.h himself

[tomknight]

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0312 .2/1241.html

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Dec 22 2003 - 16:36:47 EST
[snip]
"errno.h/signal.h/ioctl.h (and they are apparently the 2.4.x versions, before we moved some common constants into "asm-generic/errno.h"), and while I haven't analyzed them, I know for a fact that
- the original errno.h used different error numbers than "original UNIX"
I know this because I cursed it later when it meant that doing things like binary emulation wasn't as trivial - you had to translate the error numbers.
- same goes for "signal.h": while a lot of the standard signals are well documented (ie "SIGKILL is 9"), historically we had lots of confusion (ie I think "real UNIX" has SIGBUS at 10, while Linux didn't originally have any SIGBUS at all, and later put it at 7 which was originally SIGUNUSED.

So to me it looks like
- yes, Linux obviously has the same signal names and error number names that UNIX has (so the files certainly have a lot of the same identifiers)
- but equally clearly they weren't copied from any "real UNIX"."
[snip]

Re:SCO stock

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

Man...are you a shill for SCOX?

Surely you are kidding that SCOX might win. The 326 lines of codes:

#1 they dont hold Copyright on at ALL
#2 are in public domain
#3 are not even CODE!

Where as the 700,000 lines of code IBM is counter suing over ARE owned by IBM, ARE registered to them, and pretty much IBM has them by the short hairs.

As does Novell.

This is emotional to a lot of people yes. But we are also highly intelligent people who know quite a bit about this and how this came to be. While we may be emotional doesnt mean we are wrong!

Where as SCOX from day one has been wrong.

Go shill on the Yahoo board you will find no safe harbor here.

You're obviously not a coder, are you?

[multipartmixed]

Okay, the errno.h file is a list of errors.

POSIX.1, the specification, says you need to support X list of errors, and these are their names.

POSIX.1 compliance was a goal of Linux. If you RTFA carefully (or TFS) you'll note that Linus used different values for those same constants. Which, BTW, is a bone-headed move in terms of compatibility with UNIX but still within the letter of the specification. So clearly he wasn't using one as a crib sheet for the other.

This is basically like, Linus wanted to bake some cookies, so he looked at the recipe for his Mom's cookies and made a grocery list. Now his Aunt Martha has her panties in a knot because she thinks Linus stole her grocery list, because it has the same ingredients in it, because Linus' grandmother is the one who taught both his mom and his aunt how to bake chocolate chip cookies. And this is before Martha even bothers to notice that Linux is buying butterscotch chips and way too much baking soda.

Re:SCO stock

[philippic]

My favourite graph.