Clearcase, when you couple it with the UCM product and Multisite, unlimited budget, and big machines to run it on along with a dedicated crew, is an outstanding product and it's impossible to beat. You basically can't get anything better. The trouble is that it's extremely, extremely expensive (in $$$ terms) and requires big-ass hardware, and it falls to bits when you've got developers who are on the road a lot (snapshot views just don't hack it, and to support them properly you have to eliminate all reliance on Clearcase's fancy build avoidance features). I worked with Clearcase in a 60-developer Multisite environment with two large SMP Sun boxes running the Clearcase servers, with multiple gigabytes of RAM between them, and even then the Clearcase environment would freeze up during the day from time to time simply because it was trying to handle everyone working on it at once.
The killer feature of Clearcase is it's automatic dependency computation and build avoidance capabilities. These are possible because Clearcase provides an entire version-controlled filesystem called MVFS which you mount like a regular FS; it's completely transparent to the tools running on it. Thus, their custom build tool (clearmake) can watch what's going on during your build on the MVFS and automatically track build dependencies in a completely reliable manner. Of course, the flip side of this is that performance sucks; each time you stat() or otherwise access a file on that MVFS you're talking to the server which has to look up the version you're accessing (by reading your configuration spec - the powerful mechanism which defines which files you want to read out of the database) and pull it out of it's database.
Clearcase works pretty well if you've large, and separated, teams of developers who basically don't move around, and you've a team of people to babysit the servers. In this post-dot.com era, the cost and expense of such a system is hard to justify. Smaller consulting business who have developers, who need to build, constantly on the road will find Clearcase more of a hinderance than a help.
That's a pretty objective evaluation of the situation. I don't know about arch's "merge mechanism" though ? I've not tried it, but to do that job properly you need pretty advanced technology. Best of all you want some kind of graphical tool which will allow you to point and click at what chunks of code you want. The best commercial systems have that out of the box, but I've not seen it on any of the free systems.
I looked at arch - I'm sorry to say it but the user interface is simply obscure (to say the least), not vaguely friendly or intuitive, and complex for completely needless reasons. The filenames associated with it's archive directories are absurd and break all kinds of standard utilities. You've to type in or remember fairly complex commands, and several of them, to do operations which should be pretty straightforward.
I've been evaluating Bitkeeper for use in an commercial project and can safely say that it simply beats the living crap out of any of the available alternatives and easily challenges several other commercial alternatives, right up to and including the stalwarts such as Clearcase. At the end of the day it's just a matter of how valuable your time is. Do you have time to mess around with primitive solutions like CVS, writing loads of silly scripts to do simple stuff, or mess around with half-baked unfinished stuff like Arch, or do you just want to get down to business ? I suspect those questions dominate the choices most people have when it comes to SCM.
I guess it's a matter of opinion, but if you want to talk about the AI in FarCry, how many other games do you have where the baddies all get confused if you shoot their leader from the distance with a sniper (for example) ? I thought they pulled off a lot.
No, the strategy was to get people to buy the game first, as it isn't actually all that good.
When you've got stuff like FarCry doing all kinds of mindblowing things with the visuals and the gameplay, and compare that with how far Doom3 has come given how long it has supposedly been in development, Doom3 is a huge let-down. I suspect ID were well aware of this, so they delayed the demo by a month and kicked a huge marketing machine into place behind the game to shift as many copies as humanly possible, banking on the fans of the previous versions (ie folks like me) to snap it up straight away.
The reason why your laptop is so much more expensive in the UK is partly because of rip-off Britain but mainly because the people who imported the laptop in the first place have paid the UK's import duty, VAT and any other taxes as well as shipping costs.
If you import goods into the UK yourself, you are also expected to pay those VAT and tax charges for anything over the value of 250. If you try to avoid it, or lie to customs officials about the nature of the goods you're carrying, they'll not only seize the goods but slap on a hefty fine. For something expensive like a laptop this is a big risk. You can't necessarily get away with saying that it was your property and you brought it with you; they can still seize it while they wait on you to provide proof (receipts or a letter from the retailer) indicating you owned it.
In the UK these customs and excise folks absolutely do not dick about. I read a story about a woman who (probably innocent of the regulations) filled up her car with cheap wine, beer and spirits from France and drove it back across on a ferry (some people are under the misapprehension that there is unrestricted alcohol trade between EU member states - but without a trading license, the booze must be "for personal consumption"). Not only did customs seize the booze, but they also fined her and worst of all - seized the car she was driving at the time.
I don't really see the big deal. Synthesizers have been replacing musicians for decades, and have been capable of producing fairly passable orchestra synthesis for 20 years. What's new ? These articles to me seem more like publicity for the manufacturer of the machine.
There has been further analysis on Groklaw. The rclock.h, rclock.c, kmemdefs.h and kmemdefs.c files are here. This is an RCU patch seemingly provided by IBM, but which (as another contributor pointed out) were never included in the kernel by Linus.
As has been pointed out on Groklaw (and on here earlier) SCO are clearly dropping the "Linux is all stolen code" article in favour of the "IBM stole our code and put it in Linux" article. This fact needs to be shouted from the rooftops. I'm quite sure IBM can defend themselves.. (evil grin)
In this document SCO identify three groups of what they regard as "infringing" code. They readily admit that the number of examples they can provide is somewhat limited due to the fact that they don't possess themselves enough evidence to prove it. "Damn it, I know they stole it from us - if only I could get the evidence to prove it!".
The first set (Table A) is JVS code. As we all know JFS is an IBM/AIX creation, so with this SCO will be focussing on their "derived work" argument.
The second set (Table B) is EVMS code. Again, this is a less-mentioned contribution from IBM AIX into Linux. Again, this will be SCO's "derived work" according to their skewed worldview.
The third and fourth sets are the most interesting (Table C and D). They identify stuff allegedly lifted from Dynix (Sequent) code. I could not find the rclock.* or the kmemdef.* files in 2.4.18 or in 2.4.1 (the version they've named), I presume they were removed at some point - Torvalds or someone else could probably identify when.
In Table D, the code they've highlighted in the 2.4.1 apic.c file consists of #include lines, some comments, and a very basic "if" statement in the middle of some SMP related code for handling timer interrupts, it seems. It's the same in timer.c, they're also complaining about lines which refer to Alpha or IA64, rather odd since they never wrote code concerning those CPUs.
The entry.S reference they've made, going by the code comments, refers to code which switches an i386 back into user mode following a system call. (guess mode - the set of assembly mnemonics to put an i386 into user mode is likely to be very standard; the default code was probably provided free of charge by Intel years and years ago, and probably found it's way into every i386 memory-protected OS written!). The same seems true of traps.c. The main.c lines are just some includes and some static declarations.
I also did some casual Google searches to see if any of the alleged infringing lines of code showed up anywhere. In all the cases I checked, the lines show only in Linux kernels, and not anywhere else. If this code did appear elsewhere then it isn't immediately obvious where it came from.
So I really don't think that SCO has much of a leg to stand on here...
Is there any way these reports could be confirmed ?
I'm skeptical because:
(1) A three-way machine is going to be extremely expensive to build. Not ideal for a mass-market console.
(2) Microsoft supported Windows NT4.0 on PPC, but I don't think they went beyond that. I remember them saying at the time that future OSs would be ported internally beyond x86, just to ensure the OS retained it's portability, but that such things would not be actively maintained
(3) The existing base of software and APIs already available for Windows/x86 would have to be ported to the new OS and the new architecture.
(4) I've never heard of three-way SMP. Two way or four way, yes. Three way is a bit odd.
Seems he's contradicting himself slightly. He obviously believes there is some kind of embedded market for Linux, otherwise he wouldn't be selling products supporting it.
The iPod isn't the only HD based player out there man. There are many better ones not made by Apple, particularly iRiver's stuff. Archos make one which uses a 2.5" HD which is upgradeable.
On battery life MD is a clear winner. However the other areas aren't so hot.
Neither of the two Sony portable MDs I've owned have proved to be resilient, despite me taking great care with them. My MZ-N1, top of the line two years ago, failed after 18 months - stopped recording for no reason whatsoever. The price Sony want to charge me to fix it is the same price as a new, reconditioned device. That pissed me off a lot.
Secondly have you ever used Sony's jukebox software ? It's Windows-only and it's absolutely awful. It isn't clear from Sony's press release whether it will be possible to copy music onto the player (as well as other types of media) directly over USB, or if you'll have to use their jukebox product. Their daft, crippled and damn ugly DRM arrangements are a reason alone to steer clear of the product.
Thirdly the iHP-120 can also record uncompressed WAV files. And it has both optical in and out (All Sony portables are optical-in only). And what's more, you don't have to carry around a stack of blanks and keep switching them while recording.
I loved my MD while I had it and got good use out of it. But I'm afraid it can't compete with the facility of having your entire music collection (with room to spare) in your shirt pocket.
We certainly are in a lot of bother if the gulf stream stops. The future is obviously going to be in nuclear fusion and electrically-powered transport. Before then, in the UK and Ireland at least, there'll be lots of wind turbines - it's damn windy out on the North Sea and the Atlantic.
America has huge expanses of desert land where solar panels could be installed. That's energy for almost zero marginal cost - even better than turbines. And there's lots of scope for research and optimization in solar panels which are not particularly efficient at the moment (and have not advanced hugely from when they were first created).
What the hell are you going to do if/when the world's oil supply runs out ? What about the rest of us (in Europe for example) who also consume a lot of oil ? Are we going to have to fight you guys for it ? Unquestionably, the US military is more powerful than the combined European military - but huge numbers of people would die for no reason.
Instead of war, what about putting the money into researching energy efficiency and alternative energy sources ? Why do you consider your tax dollars better spent on death, destruction and imperialism rather than technological advancement ?
You're welcome to your iPOD. I'll keep my iHP-120 which I can connect to modern Windows or Linux boxen without installing any device drivers, and onto which I can drag and drop my MP3/OGG files to directly without any silly jiggery pokery. And if I like, I can use it as a 20GB portable hard disk.
In Northern Ireland, triangulation was used to track the locations and movements of the individuals suspected to be behind the Omagh bombing - so not only does the technique work, but it has been effectively used.
The interesting thing about this is that it was done retrospectively, so the cellular phone provider must have been maintaining logs tracking the positions of the phones, which the police simply had to request. The Omagh bomb was so outrageous that civil liberties-style complaints were decidedly muted.
The point is more than moot; I'm a software engineer and like most people here I love fixing problems with computers and electronics. But the important point here is that electronic voting is a solution to a problem which does not exist.
Having attended several election counts in the UK, I have to ask why you guys don't you do what we do - have the electorate mark their ballot papers as appropriate, and then count the votes BY HAND a a count session to which *all* of the candidates are invited ? This way all of the candidates can clearly observe the ballots being counted, and can quickly flag the official(s) in charge of the election if there's something fishy afoot. There's no room for any fiddling of the vote to take place, and thus no room for suspicion or paranoia. It's sane, understandable by the non-IT literate (in other words, the majority of the public) and there are NEVER any disputes about votes being counted wrongly. The views of all of the candidates are sought on the counting of erroneously marked or spoilt ballots.
Even better, since the votes are all simply deposited in a sealed box (opened after the count) parties who are particularly paranoid and suspicious about the count can put their own seal on the ballot box. That way they can be satisfied that no-one has attempted to interfere with the votesHow could this be achieved with electronic voting or even the existing mechanical mechanism in the US ?
Machine-based counting has only one benefit - the results are known more quickly. I doubt the election is cheaper to run, as the machines need to be maintained and the ballots specially printed to work with them. The worst problem with the whole caboodle is that neither the candidates nor the public can easily examine what the machines are doing while counting. In that respect electronic votes are *even worse* as you press a button and your vote disappears into a black electronic box - anything could happen to it, open source or not!
The single most important priority here is that the general public can see that their vote isn't being fiddled and have confidence in the democratic process. A regime where there is widespread discontent over the way the votes are counted isn't a democracy.
As we all know, Microsoft have already gotten around this by simply coming up with their own, very similar language - they don't need to simply hijack another free one; and in any case, the GPL (which they hate) would make this difficult to do anyway.
As the article points out, no-one knows that this code was SCO's to begin with. It could have found it's way from Linux to SCO's code. It could have bubbled it's way up from the earlier BSD releases. Who knows ?
If the case was really that simple it sounds like it's open-and-shut. It's hard to understand why SCO won't show it publicly, or allow anyone to see it without making them sign a huge NDA. What do they have to lose ?
And even then, the 80 lines would have to be pretty critical to form the basis for claims of $1bn in damages. How many thousands of lines of code are there in Linux (or any other OS) and how many blocks of 80 lines are singularly critical to the whole functioning of the OS ?
Slashdot Mirror
Clearcase, when you couple it with the UCM product and Multisite, unlimited budget, and big machines to run it on along with a dedicated crew, is an outstanding product and it's impossible to beat. You basically can't get anything better. The trouble is that it's extremely, extremely expensive (in $$$ terms) and requires big-ass hardware, and it falls to bits when you've got developers who are on the road a lot (snapshot views just don't hack it, and to support them properly you have to eliminate all reliance on Clearcase's fancy build avoidance features). I worked with Clearcase in a 60-developer Multisite environment with two large SMP Sun boxes running the Clearcase servers, with multiple gigabytes of RAM between them, and even then the Clearcase environment would freeze up during the day from time to time simply because it was trying to handle everyone working on it at once.
The killer feature of Clearcase is it's automatic dependency computation and build avoidance capabilities. These are possible because Clearcase provides an entire version-controlled filesystem called MVFS which you mount like a regular FS; it's completely transparent to the tools running on it. Thus, their custom build tool (clearmake) can watch what's going on during your build on the MVFS and automatically track build dependencies in a completely reliable manner. Of course, the flip side of this is that performance sucks; each time you stat() or otherwise access a file on that MVFS you're talking to the server which has to look up the version you're accessing (by reading your configuration spec - the powerful mechanism which defines which files you want to read out of the database) and pull it out of it's database.
Clearcase works pretty well if you've large, and separated, teams of developers who basically don't move around, and you've a team of people to babysit the servers. In this post-dot.com era, the cost and expense of such a system is hard to justify. Smaller consulting business who have developers, who need to build, constantly on the road will find Clearcase more of a hinderance than a help.
That's a pretty objective evaluation of the situation. I don't know about arch's "merge mechanism" though ? I've not tried it, but to do that job properly you need pretty advanced technology. Best of all you want some kind of graphical tool which will allow you to point and click at what chunks of code you want. The best commercial systems have that out of the box, but I've not seen it on any of the free systems.
I looked at arch - I'm sorry to say it but the user interface is simply obscure (to say the least), not vaguely friendly or intuitive, and complex for completely needless reasons. The filenames associated with it's archive directories are absurd and break all kinds of standard utilities. You've to type in or remember fairly complex commands, and several of them, to do operations which should be pretty straightforward.
I've been evaluating Bitkeeper for use in an commercial project and can safely say that it simply beats the living crap out of any of the available alternatives and easily challenges several other commercial alternatives, right up to and including the stalwarts such as Clearcase. At the end of the day it's just a matter of how valuable your time is. Do you have time to mess around with primitive solutions like CVS, writing loads of silly scripts to do simple stuff, or mess around with half-baked unfinished stuff like Arch, or do you just want to get down to business ? I suspect those questions dominate the choices most people have when it comes to SCM.
I guess it's a matter of opinion, but if you want to talk about the AI in FarCry, how many other games do you have where the baddies all get confused if you shoot their leader from the distance with a sniper (for example) ? I thought they pulled off a lot.
No, the strategy was to get people to buy the game first, as it isn't actually all that good.
When you've got stuff like FarCry doing all kinds of mindblowing things with the visuals and the gameplay, and compare that with how far Doom3 has come given how long it has supposedly been in development, Doom3 is a huge let-down. I suspect ID were well aware of this, so they delayed the demo by a month and kicked a huge marketing machine into place behind the game to shift as many copies as humanly possible, banking on the fans of the previous versions (ie folks like me) to snap it up straight away.
Actually flash drives *do* wear out eventually. There is a limit to the number of times a sector can be rewritten, numbering in the thousands.
The reason why your laptop is so much more expensive in the UK is partly because of rip-off Britain but mainly because the people who imported the laptop in the first place have paid the UK's import duty, VAT and any other taxes as well as shipping costs.
If you import goods into the UK yourself, you are also expected to pay those VAT and tax charges for anything over the value of 250. If you try to avoid it, or lie to customs officials about the nature of the goods you're carrying, they'll not only seize the goods but slap on a hefty fine. For something expensive like a laptop this is a big risk. You can't necessarily get away with saying that it was your property and you brought it with you; they can still seize it while they wait on you to provide proof (receipts or a letter from the retailer) indicating you owned it.
In the UK these customs and excise folks absolutely do not dick about. I read a story about a woman who (probably innocent of the regulations) filled up her car with cheap wine, beer and spirits from France and drove it back across on a ferry (some people are under the misapprehension that there is unrestricted alcohol trade between EU member states - but without a trading license, the booze must be "for personal consumption"). Not only did customs seize the booze, but they also fined her and worst of all - seized the car she was driving at the time.
read about another example
North Korea and Iran don't have delivery systems that can reach the US
Wrong.
Wow, let's create a master race!
I don't really see the big deal. Synthesizers have been replacing musicians for decades, and have been capable of producing fairly passable orchestra synthesis for 20 years. What's new ? These articles to me seem more like publicity for the manufacturer of the machine.
Replying to my own post here ..
.. (evil grin)
There has been further analysis on Groklaw. The rclock.h, rclock.c, kmemdefs.h and kmemdefs.c files are here. This is an RCU patch seemingly provided by IBM, but which (as another contributor pointed out) were never included in the kernel by Linus.
As has been pointed out on Groklaw (and on here earlier) SCO are clearly dropping the "Linux is all stolen code" article in favour of the "IBM stole our code and put it in Linux" article. This fact needs to be shouted from the rooftops. I'm quite sure IBM can defend themselves
In this document SCO identify three groups of what they regard as "infringing" code. They readily admit that the number of examples they can provide is somewhat limited due to the fact that they don't possess themselves enough evidence to prove it. "Damn it, I know they stole it from us - if only I could get the evidence to prove it!".
...
The first set (Table A) is JVS code. As we all know JFS is an IBM/AIX creation, so with this SCO will be focussing on their "derived work" argument.
The second set (Table B) is EVMS code. Again, this is a less-mentioned contribution from IBM AIX into Linux. Again, this will be SCO's "derived work" according to their skewed worldview.
The third and fourth sets are the most interesting (Table C and D). They identify stuff allegedly lifted from Dynix (Sequent) code. I could not find the rclock.* or the kmemdef.* files in 2.4.18 or in 2.4.1 (the version they've named), I presume they were removed at some point - Torvalds or someone else could probably identify when.
In Table D, the code they've highlighted in the 2.4.1 apic.c file consists of #include lines, some comments, and a very basic "if" statement in the middle of some SMP related code for handling timer interrupts, it seems. It's the same in timer.c, they're also complaining about lines which refer to Alpha or IA64, rather odd since they never wrote code concerning those CPUs.
The entry.S reference they've made, going by the code comments, refers to code which switches an i386 back into user mode following a system call. (guess mode - the set of assembly mnemonics to put an i386 into user mode is likely to be very standard; the default code was probably provided free of charge by Intel years and years ago, and probably found it's way into every i386 memory-protected OS written!).
The same seems true of traps.c. The main.c lines are just some includes and some static declarations.
I also did some casual Google searches to see if any of the alleged infringing lines of code showed up anywhere. In all the cases I checked, the lines show only in Linux kernels, and not anywhere else. If this code did appear elsewhere then it isn't immediately obvious where it came from.
So I really don't think that SCO has much of a leg to stand on here
Is there any way these reports could be confirmed ?
:
I'm skeptical because
(1) A three-way machine is going to be extremely expensive to build. Not ideal for a mass-market console.
(2) Microsoft supported Windows NT4.0 on PPC, but I don't think they went beyond that. I remember them saying at the time that future OSs would be ported internally beyond x86, just to ensure the OS retained it's portability, but that such things would not be actively maintained
(3) The existing base of software and APIs already available for Windows/x86 would have to be ported to the new OS and the new architecture.
(4) I've never heard of three-way SMP. Two way or four way, yes. Three way is a bit odd.
Actually I thought Hipcrime had been at work (clicky)..
Amusingly, his company sells compilers and debugging products for Linux :
n ux .pdf
http://www.ghs.com/download/datasheets/multi_li
Seems he's contradicting himself slightly. He obviously believes there is some kind of embedded market for Linux, otherwise he wouldn't be selling products supporting it.
Wrong on several counts.
* The Windows NT kernel upon which XP is based dates back to a early/mid-1980s collaboration with IBM.
* There are plenty of good reasons to use something else. Code Red is one.
The iPod isn't the only HD based player out there man. There are many better ones not made by Apple, particularly iRiver's stuff. Archos make one which uses a 2.5" HD which is upgradeable.
On battery life MD is a clear winner. However the other areas aren't so hot.
Neither of the two Sony portable MDs I've owned have proved to be resilient, despite me taking great care with them. My MZ-N1, top of the line two years ago, failed after 18 months - stopped recording for no reason whatsoever. The price Sony want to charge me to fix it is the same price as a new, reconditioned device. That pissed me off a lot.
Secondly have you ever used Sony's jukebox software ? It's Windows-only and it's absolutely awful. It isn't clear from Sony's press release whether it will be possible to copy music onto the player (as well as other types of media) directly over USB, or if you'll have to use their jukebox product. Their daft, crippled and damn ugly DRM arrangements are a reason alone to steer clear of the product.
Thirdly the iHP-120 can also record uncompressed WAV files. And it has both optical in and out (All Sony portables are optical-in only). And what's more, you don't have to carry around a stack of blanks and keep switching them while recording.
I loved my MD while I had it and got good use out of it. But I'm afraid it can't compete with the facility of having your entire music collection (with room to spare) in your shirt pocket.
We certainly are in a lot of bother if the gulf stream stops. The future is obviously going to be in nuclear fusion and electrically-powered transport. Before then, in the UK and Ireland at least, there'll be lots of wind turbines - it's damn windy out on the North Sea and the Atlantic.
America has huge expanses of desert land where solar panels could be installed. That's energy for almost zero marginal cost - even better than turbines. And there's lots of scope for research and optimization in solar panels which are not particularly efficient at the moment (and have not advanced hugely from when they were first created).
What the hell are you going to do if/when the world's oil supply runs out ? What about the rest of us (in Europe for example) who also consume a lot of oil ? Are we going to have to fight you guys for it ? Unquestionably, the US military is more powerful than the combined European military - but huge numbers of people would die for no reason.
Instead of war, what about putting the money into researching energy efficiency and alternative energy sources ? Why do you consider your tax dollars better spent on death, destruction and imperialism rather than technological advancement ?
You're welcome to your iPOD. I'll keep my iHP-120 which I can connect to modern Windows or Linux boxen without installing any device drivers, and onto which I can drag and drop my MP3/OGG files to directly without any silly jiggery pokery. And if I like, I can use it as a 20GB portable hard disk.
precise link on the mobile phone tracking technique as used over Omagh.
In Northern Ireland, triangulation was used to track the locations and movements of the individuals suspected to be behind the Omagh bombing - so not only does the technique work, but it has been effectively used.
The interesting thing about this is that it was done retrospectively, so the cellular phone provider must have been maintaining logs tracking the positions of the phones, which the police simply had to request. The Omagh bomb was so outrageous that civil liberties-style complaints were decidedly muted.
This chap too
The point is more than moot; I'm a software engineer and like most people here I love fixing problems with computers and electronics. But the important point here is that electronic voting is a solution to a problem which does not exist.
Having attended several election counts in the UK, I have to ask why you guys don't you do what we do - have the electorate mark their ballot papers as appropriate, and then count the votes BY HAND a a count session to which *all* of the candidates are invited ? This way all of the candidates can clearly observe the ballots being counted, and can quickly flag the official(s) in charge of the election if there's something fishy afoot. There's no room for any fiddling of the vote to take place, and thus no room for suspicion or paranoia. It's sane, understandable by the non-IT literate (in other words, the majority of the public) and there are NEVER any disputes about votes being counted wrongly. The views of all of the candidates are sought on the counting of erroneously marked or spoilt ballots.
Even better, since the votes are all simply deposited in a sealed box (opened after the count) parties who are particularly paranoid and suspicious about the count can put their own seal on the ballot box. That way they can be satisfied that no-one has attempted to interfere with the votesHow could this be achieved with electronic voting or even the existing mechanical mechanism in the US ?
Machine-based counting has only one benefit - the results are known more quickly. I doubt the election is cheaper to run, as the machines need to be maintained and the ballots specially printed to work with them. The worst problem with the whole caboodle is that neither the candidates nor the public can easily examine what the machines are doing while counting. In that respect electronic votes are *even worse* as you press a button and your vote disappears into a black electronic box - anything could happen to it, open source or not!
The single most important priority here is that the general public can see that their vote isn't being fiddled and have confidence in the democratic process. A regime where there is widespread discontent over the way the votes are counted isn't a democracy.
As we all know, Microsoft have already gotten around this by simply coming up with their own, very similar language - they don't need to simply hijack another free one; and in any case, the GPL (which they hate) would make this difficult to do anyway.
As the article points out, no-one knows that this code was SCO's to begin with. It could have found it's way from Linux to SCO's code. It could have bubbled it's way up from the earlier BSD releases. Who knows ?
If the case was really that simple it sounds like it's open-and-shut. It's hard to understand why SCO won't show it publicly, or allow anyone to see it without making them sign a huge NDA. What do they have to lose ?
And even then, the 80 lines would have to be pretty critical to form the basis for claims of $1bn in damages. How many thousands of lines of code are there in Linux (or any other OS) and how many blocks of 80 lines are singularly critical to the whole functioning of the OS ?