Slashdot Mirror
Claimed Proof That UNIX Code Was Copied Into Linux
walterbyrd writes "SCO's ex-CEO's brother, a lawyer named Kevin McBride, has finally revealed some of the UNIX code that SCO claimed was copied into Linux. Scroll down to the comments where it reads: 'SCO submitted a very material amount of literal copying from UNIX to Linux in the SCO v. IBM case. For example, see the following excerpts from SCO's evidence submission in Dec. 2005 in the SCO v. IBM case:' There are a number of links to PDF files containing UNIX code that SCO claimed was copied into Linux (until they lost the battle by losing ownership of UNIX)." Many of the snippets I looked at are pretty generic. Others, like this one (PDF), would require an extremely liberal view of the term "copy and paste."
Nah it's a joke. The only thing highlighted were the function / subroutine definitions and not even across the board. Just because 2 programs have hooks or functions called "ReadX" does not mean there was any copying involved. They even highlighted include statements and data structures. It's almost like suing an author for starting with "Once upon a time". I guess they just figured no judge would be able to clue in on this kind of stuff and they would be able to sift through junk like this for decades. Hell they could use the same reasoning against pretty much any software and win if that is all the proof he needed. I guess Unix was truly the precursor to all the code ever written so Novell can truly say "all your base are belong to us".
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
this fiaSCO has been running on for nearly 8 years - what the hell is up with the courts that they keep this bullshit alive. /dev/null
Kill -9 all | sort >
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
No one cares whether it's a public spec or not (it may be, I do not know). It's a OS header file. The functions have to be named the same way in order for end-user programs to be source-compatible. If you've been programming for 20 years, this shouldn't be too hard to grasp.
If SCO were allowed to claim copyright over this, then it would be simply impossible for Linux to provide a compatible libelf. This means you'd essentially prevent anyone from ever making compatible OS libraries, as they'd be infringing on the original author's copyright. That would be ridiculous. Public function names and prototypes (documented or not, standardized or not) are not considered copyrightable.
Another example: is Wine, according to you, a humongous violation of Microsoft's copyrights? After all, it implements the Windows API with identical function names and prototypes, undocumented features and all (which is nowhere near a published standard of any sort).
"It's not an "outdated idea". If you really think that copyrights and patents are a bad idea, you need only look at countries where they did not exist -- like Russia during its peak of Socialist power -- to see how that works out economically. Hint: it doesn't. "
You're seriously assigning all the problems with the Soviet economy to their lack of copyright? You, sir, take the cake. That's the most absurd statement in support of copyright I have ever heard.
"The idea being that those who ignore (or don't know) their history, will be doomed to repeat it. And you obviously don't know your history, or I am about as certain as the sun will come up tomorrow that you would change your mind on that issue. "
Given your interpretation of the history of economics is rather... I'll be nice and say 'intriguing', I guess I have to agree that I don't know it. I don't see how the lack of copyright led to Stalin screwing the country over, but I guess I am just dense.
"The fact that some laws have been corrupted, like the duration of copyrights for example, is not justification for elimination of all such laws. Sure, it needs to put back the way it was, but not eliminated."
But the fact they are built on the concept of preventing free flow of information - and the fact they can no longer be enforced even by companies with more power than some countries - DOES make copyright and patents outdated. That ship has sailed.
"Copyrights and patents were established for the public good, and believe me, in the places where there are none, there is also damned little public good."
The entire world prior to about the 18th century begs to differ with you. On the other hand, I don't know history, so don't listen to me; nothing of merit was produced before copyright! The Greek epics, countless thousands of books, paintings, songs, architecture, machine designs, all came to exist about 300 years ago, right around the time copyright was invented. Not one before it was established. Thank you for setting the record straight!
Great Intellect...
Umm, no. This is only logical. If he had the documentation to data types, or even if he reverse engineered them, they would be identical. I have done some trampolining of functions to/from code which i only have binary access. If I am handling a struct, I would examine the structure in memory and make my struct identical so I could copy it with simple memcpy(to, fro, sizeof(struct)), or replace references by just changing the pointer to different place.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Sorry, Jane. You are wrong. Not your fault, really, since you are just repeating what you've been told many times over the years. But it is wrong.
Your appeal to socialist Russia as an example of why copyrights are needed is laughable. The Soviet system failed mainly for many reasons, but lack of copyright recognition wasn't one of them.
The fact is that the idea that copyrights and patents are a benefit to society is based on no evidence at all. It is one of those ideas that were accepted for a long time without being examined in any detail. There are many examples of places and times where copyrights and patents did not exist and innovation there certainly was not harmed, and careful studies have found pretty good evidence that innovation was helped by their absence. The site techdirt.com discusses these issues regularly, frequently pointing to academic research in peer reviewed journals so you can check out the research yourself if you don't trust the reporting. But you don't have to depend only on research. There are examples today where industries thrive in the absence of copyrights or patents. One easy to understand example is the fashion business. No copyrights or patents. Lots of copying, yet good money is being made by many players. And there's certainly no lack innovation there.
It certainly is true that eliminating copyrights and patents would be kind of disruptive, since some large businesses have come to depend on the artifical monopoly authorized by copyright and patents. But there is reason to believe that we would be better off now had they never been invented. Whether the disruption that would come from eliminating them is reason enough to keep them is questionable. I am pretty sure we would quickly adjust to their absence if they were abolished tomorrow, and be better off, on the whole. Of course, that is unlikely to happen because our government is bought and paid for by the businesses that depend on copyrights and patents, so we will have to suffer the burden of these government-granted monopolies for some considerable time to come.
Since we have to rely on this PDF , and there is no way to prove that that code was actually in UNIX at the moment ( as it's closed , there's no way to check ) .
I am left to conclude that it's much easier to copy from Linux (which is open ) , than from UNIX ( which is closed ).
In other words , using this PDF , i could also claim to SCO stole from Linux , and then implemented it in their commercial product , thus violating the GPL .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Header files are public - but they seldom contains any advanced functionality. They are just a definition of the calls available, defined data types and constants.
If the header files didn't contain the same (or very similar) definitions then the API wouldn't work. I expect the same header definitions to reappear in many other operating systems with minor differences - many even in Windows (Which do have a Posix API)
But of course - a lawyer wouldn't understand that, it's just a question of money.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This was the first time I had a chance to see any of their "evidence". How exactly did this make it all the way to court?
Especially given that "original" files appear to have been altered to contain comments to the effect that a USL copyright statement somehow proves that the information is "UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE" together with a meaningless statement about the existance of a copyright statement not implying publication.
It looks as though they have "mailmerged" part of their claims into their supposed evidence. Shouldn't this have resulted in the judge throwing this out as null and void?
I'm all for strict ethical standards, and I won't claim to have gone through more than a half dozen of these PDF's checking them.
That said - the six or so files I looked at were exclusively issues about some fairly well established naming conventions, the repetition of which is about as unlikely as finding an elm street and sycamore street 'coincidentally' close to each other in both our home towns and calling it 'evidence' the city planner of one stole the plans of the city planner of the other.
I've heard people claim in several posts that "Well, if you looked at the PDF's that weren't cherry picked for ridiculousness ..." there are 'obvious' copying of code. That may be, but I'd like someone to actually link to a pdf with this obvious copying of code - burying the evidence in bullshit data is what you do when the evidence is against you and you *don't* want the other side to find it, not when it's in your favor and you're trying to make your case.
At a minimum, the fact that he has buried his 'evidence' in with other bs data doesn't make it very clear he knows what actual evidence of copying would look like.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
They both had a common parent which was public with those structures. Remember these were public APIs, no one is disputing that the structures were similar. The question is whether the implementations were copyright violations.
"it was certainly a matter of one window with unix source to read from, the other window with linux source to write"
Hell no. That's a bullshit accusation.
Here we likely have a programmer who has never seen the SCO code (was it even released publicly back then?) but knows that applications can call functionY from libraryX from the interface documentation. If he creates a new libraryX containing a compatible functionY he isn't violating copyright. It is established that creating code with a compatible API interface isn't a copyright violation unless you actually do copy the code.
Indeed it appears this is exactly what is happening in the linked elflib files. The filenames are the same because they have to be (note both the redhat_libelf.h and SCO_libelf.h are actually referred to by just libelf.h in code and elflib.h is what applications need to link to) and the functions are the same because they have to be or else applications will be calling functions that don't exist.
This also happens with the WINE project. People there are creating the same header filenames and inside those headers the exact same function names. They aren't working off a split screen setup and blatantly copying Microsofts closed source code. They are merely recreating the functions that applications can call in Windows.
A similar thing happened years ago with Compaqs IBM compatible BIOS. Compaq re-created the IBM BIOS to get around having to buy the IBM BIOS. Both BIOSes responded to the same application calls in the same way with the same return values and messages. Despite this Compaq didn't break copyright because they still re-wrote the code. In fact Compaq hired engineers specifically for the fact they had never seen IBM BIOS code. This way it could be easily established that they didn't copy the code but instead just wrote the same code that performed the same task.
OK show me something that is not a header, non obvious, and not found in an open common variant such as BSD. post should be modded ignorant.
Because in FORTRAN, variable names beginning with letters I through N meant integers, and all other meant floating-point. For those with some FORTRAN experience, naming the first 6 loop counters "i,j,k,l,m,n" is automatic.