SCO's McBride Testifies "Linux Is a copy of UNIX"

eldavojohn writes "Here's a short update on the Novell Vs. SCO case we've been following. Our good friend Darl McBride made some interesting comments in court yesterday. He stated (under oath): 'Many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers... We have evidence System V is in Linux... When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist. Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them]." This flies directly in the face of what SCO found in extensive investigations in 2002 and contradicts what SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag had just finished testifying earlier that day (testimony that McBride did not hear)."

Comments

Re:This should be good

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Steve Balmer's chair I hope.

The awesome part about this

[WindBourne]

is that McBride really COULD go to prison over this for perjury. And if done right, a deal could be offered to him (1 month or year, instead of 20 years), if he will spill the beans about it. That would have to include MS's and Sun's participation in this. I would guess that McBride is enough of a gutless wonder that he would take the deal. But if he confirms that (Gates and/or Balmer) and McNealy were participants to fleece the companies, what could happen to them? I am guessing nothing.

Re:This should be good

[doti]

Linux is NOT Unix. You got it wrong. It's GNU that is not Unix.

Re:This should be good

[Simon Brooke]

You're right. It isn't. It is, however, Unix-like. And intended to be POSIX compliant. And an awful lot of Unix utilities and abilities have found their way into Linux, starting with the System V-compatible init. X, BASH (and its variants)... you could go on for hours listing programs and commands that have found their way into Linux from the Unix world. Perhaps the most obvious example aside from BASH would be XFCE, which models its interface after the CDE.

<sigh/>

You expect Slashdot readers to be tech literate, but sadly they ain't. Not these days anyway.

'Linux' is a kernel. Both in fact and in the context of this court case, that's all 'Linux' is. Bash is not part of Linux. Init is not part of Linux. They are programs which can run on top of Linux (or any other POSIX compliant operating system, including UNIX).

Yes, I know we've all got lazy and refer to Ubuntu and Debian and Slackware and RedHat as 'Linux', but they aren't. They are software distributions which use the Linux kernel. The kernel - and only the kernel - is 'Linux'.