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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."
It's not an "outdated idea".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.
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.
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. 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.
I will go so far, however, to say that computer programs are properly covered under copyrights, not patents. Software patents are clearly not in the interest of the public, or free markets.
They copied the API ? Then the question is it possible to copyright an API ? AFAIK, it is. So this is not permissible. However, it seems that some of the API was copied from BSD, not UNIX, and the BSD licence allows you to do this.
Counter argument: just suppose libelf was a Linux creation. SCO writes their own version with exactly the same API, but it's closed source. They sell their version as part of UNIX^TM. A Linux kernel developer comes across the header files for SCO's version during their day job and notices the API is identical. OSS community up in arms ? GPL violation claim ?
The books were rather obscure and very pricey.
Obscure in what sense? Everyone knew about them, and anyone who wanted to do any serious low-level work with the IBM PC would have an original copy or get ready for this a photocopy of relevant parts. You (or, more accurately, the person you're playing on the Internet) had access, and you know it.
especially when reverse engineering was plenty fun work anyway. It was like solving a puzzle.
Oh, well, of course, businesses routinely tell their employees to make their work harder and more error-prone because it's "plenty fun" and "like solving a puzzle".
Look. You read the original code. You admit to reading the original code. You observed techniques in the original code. You observed quirks in the original code. You then admit that (behind closed doors) you liaised with people who wrote a derived version of that code. It is completely dishonest to claim other than you produced a derived work of the IBM BIOS.
At any rate, I have no doubt that IBM had their lawyers pore over every byte of the Compaq BIOS looking for evidence of copying. If there had been any, they would have stomped Compaq off the map.
It's quite easy to produce something which looks byte-for-byte quite different while essentially being a copy of original code - but you have to look at the original to do this. If you don't look at original code, you are going to quite incidentally and accidentally produce very similar routines (see the Linux vs SCO fiasco) by the nature of coding.
Anyway, lawyers are not programmers and IBM may not have wanted to stop Compaq. Your persona is just a lowly engineer and has no special insight into the ties between the firms.
If none of that had happened anywhere, all systems from different vendors would still be totally incompatible and proprietary
The dominance of the IBM PC architecture is probably one of the worst things to happen to computing and there were so many better architectures (some of them quite open) which could have won over. Thanks for nothing.
Holy shit.
So you're saying that only source code is forbidden, but compiled code is free game?
IBM's work was stolen.
Plain and simple.
You can call it creating a "derived work" if you want
So why does it matter whether you have read the IBM TRM or not? Derive from IBM source / derive from IBM object.
It doesn't matter that you call it: It was perfectly legal
The term you are not looking for is "irrelevant", not "legal".
Sony v. Connectix in 1999 finally confirmed that the whole "copying is determined by whether the code has been viewed" is bullshit. Connectix openly admitted to looking at object code directly and freely in order to produce an emulator. Sony failed because Sony could not prove that the protected creative aspect of Sony's work had been copied by Connectix.
IBM's mock lawsuit against Compaq (I say "mock" because it expended pretty much no resources by IBM standards, and probably existed only to placate certain investors) failed because Compaq did a good job of creating a BIOS which looked nothing like IBM's BIOS, even while behaving like IBM's BIOS and created by looking at IBM's BIOS.
Compaq never made any secret about what it was doing or the steps it took when to do it. This is a well-established legal area.
The lie here is in claiming not to have read the TRMs, and the misdirection is in giving the impression that whether it's legal depends on whether the TRMs were read. The lie to the technically inexperienced court is in claiming that you didn't essentially copy the IBM BIOS in all but machine code byte order.
Reverse engineering is completely legal if done properly. Deal with it.
Everything non-criminal is completely legal if done sufficiently sneakily and with no private party sufficiently interested in stopping you. What kind of a stupid argument is this?