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Claimed Proof That UNIX Code Was Copied Into Linux

Posted by kdawson on from the copied-by-a-spider-on-lsd dept.

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."

17 of 578 comments (clear)

  1. First post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Copy and paste is how all open source developers "create" code isn't it? Stealing from hard working commercial developers

    1. Re:First post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Just don't forget to pay your SCO licensing fees you cock-smoking teabaggers!

    2. Re:First post by FuckingNickName · · Score: -1, Troll

      In fact Compaq hired engineers specifically for the fact they had never seen IBM BIOS code.

      This is one of the great hilarities of PC lore, and obvious bullshit as the code was published to the public. Anyone with the technical expertise to write a BIOS would have incidentally flipped through the pages of the IBM tech ref manual which contained the source. And the idea that this key book to early '80s PC tech (still worryingly relevant today!) was somehow missing from all the bookshelves reachable by the Compaq BIOS writing department is just silly.

      Put a group of men working for money in a room, offer them enough money and they will deny anything. Perhaps the PC clone world would be far more tolerable if everyone had acknowledged that it was born on a simple act of idea and expression "piracy" (see also Microsoft).

      (The story sometimes is described as: group A saw the code, wrote up a description of the code, then showed only the description to group B. This is at least approaching honest.)

    3. Re:First post by FuckingNickName · · Score: -1, Troll

      (1) You're an AC and you could just be making everything up - indeed, it's quite likely, as you've given enough detail about your role that you could be identified;

      (2) If you actually were involved in writing Compaq BIOS code, there is no way in hell you'd wander into Slashdot almost two decades later to admit that Compaq BIOS writers read IBM BIOS source - you were part of the initial lie, and repeating the lie a few years isn't new proof of anything;

      (3) You're introducing another variant of my parenthesised story, which essentially comes down to the corporation making a derived work of the IBM BIOS but with a split of responsibility between readers and writers. Moreover, you, AC, are claiming to the be lynchpin of the whole PC clone age: the guy who read the IBM BIOS in response to Compaq BIOS writers' questions but only gave answers in such a magic way as to not give rise to accusations of copyright abuse.

      Compaq developers worked out a way to make those bytes at that address appear in part of an actual executable code sequence instead.

      So? If they'd reverse engineered user code they'd be able to find out that the string needs to be there and could have legitimately inserted the string as straight data. But it's all part of the bullshit to distract with some convoluted aside, eh?

      Compaq had administrative staff remove the BIOS listings from all IBM tech ref manuals before they were given to the engineers.

      This bit is especially hilarious. It must have been during the "fascist totalitarianism" days of Reaganism when it was completely impossible to get hold of books which weren't in some specific location on some specially designated shelf. And may God have mercy on your soul if you had read a copy of forbidden tomes (available for purchase by anyone without NDA) before employment or in the evenings at home.

    4. Re:First post by FuckingNickName · · Score: 0, Troll

      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.

    5. Re:First post by FuckingNickName · · Score: -1, Troll

      I said *disassembled*, with a debugger. That's not reading the source code in the books, which I had no access to.

      Which is reading the original code and confirmation that you created a derived work. You can pretend until your grave that the interaction between the "did read IBM BIOS" and "didn't read IBM BIOS" group was in some way so specific and perfect that Compaq couldn't be regarded as creating a derived work, but it's conceptual nonsense. You personally didn't create a derived work, but Compaq as a whole created a derived work.

      What is more, by reading the book source you would make both understanding the code easier and avoiding accidental duplication of IBM cunning easier. And once you'd read the code there would be no reason not to read the book: either way you were basing your work on direct study of IBM code.

      Look, you're either a troll or know nothing about this topic.

      Only one of us is an AC pretending to be the key technical member of the PC clone revolution.

    6. Re:First post by sexconker · · Score: 0, Troll

      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.

    7. Re:First post by FuckingNickName · · Score: -1, Troll

      Yesterday on /. I was a "thief" for blocking iAds, today I'm a "troll" for suggesting that studying object code to create a derived work is creating a derived work.

      Welcome to the contradictory world of freetards: where everything's fair game until you start using their stuff.

    8. Re:First post by FuckingNickName · · Score: 0, Troll

      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?

  2. Incoming incessant sopssa trolling! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Sopssa is a fucking worthless troll. Remember it moderators!

    Peace out!

  3. Re:What's so liberal about it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Attacking AC post is a fair game, stupid AC.

  4. Who needs proof? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    We all know Linux is nothing but a rip off of other people's work.

    What do all the fanbois like to say about Microsoft? Oh... yeah.... Where's the innovation?

    You know it is true.

  5. IP is good for you. Software should not be "free." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Straight from the horse's ass.

    5. Software should not be “free.” In this new day and age of corporate control of the world, IP rights are an important barrier of protection that help the little guy. Big companies mostly don’t need IP rights, because they can get their way through force and market power. Small companies and individual developers need strong IP rights so the fruits of their labor are not commoditized by big companies.

  6. Re:Oh Good by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.

  7. th1s is goatsex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Acoounts for less real problems Errors. Future I = 36440 FreeBSD fastest-growing GAY

  8. Re:comments added... by kegon · · Score: 0, Troll

    It just means that the coders implemented functions with the same names

    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 ?

  9. Re:Palin by INT_QRK · · Score: -1, Troll

    First of all, whatever code was "copied" so long ago has likely long since been overwritten by updates over the years. Secondly, and on topic only because it was brought in by the troll, the visceral and inane hatred by lefties of Palin, who has not actually killed or eaten any babies or loved ones that has been proven as far as I know, seems rather pathological. What specific ideas of hers have you people so spooked? If she's actually so stupid and vacuous as so often screeched by the haters, then isn't she actually harmless? Chill. You look like idiots.