The Linux RCU code is not from AIX nor Dynix, please read this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74586&cid=6686 573
Infact SCO admit they down own the copyrights to RCU, NUMA or JFS as per this story: http://mozillaquest.com/Linux03/ScoSource- 24-Copyr ights_Story01.html
Cutting through the noise SCO are claiming that IBM can not add technology added to AIX to Linux it's more to do with contracts than copyrights.
I've just had a look at the original RCU patches contributed by IBM for 2.4.1, (RCU web site, http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/rcupdate.html)
One of the copyright notices from a file:
Support for deferred freeing of memory using Read-Copy Update mechanism.
Copyright (c) International Business Machines Corp., 2001
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Author: Dipankar Sarma [dipankar@sequent.com]
(Based on a Dynix/ptx implementation by
Paul Mckenney [paul.mckenney@us.ibm.com])
IBM aquired Sequent in 1999, the copyright notice on this file from 2001. The important thing is that this code is based on an implementation and not the actual original code as such this is not Dynix/pty code.
SCO could argue that since it is based on the code then it is actually a copy, however from what I have seen of the contract clauses (mainly from groklaw) IBM are free to use any knowledge/processes/etc gained from adding to AIX.
Probably the two pieces of code look similar and I can believe even the comments since the implementor had access to original code. In addition to this it could be argued that it would be impossible to implement the code without there being similarities or even being nearly identical in places. For example try implementing a bouble-sort/linked list/etc without the code looking similar.
The only thing left are the RCU patents and IBM own these.
Having looked at this now SCO's case is pretty thin, they could win of course nothing is impossible (though unlikely), however it would just be a case of copyright violation and someone outside of IBM could do a re-implementation of RCU. In addition since RCU is n't part of the mainstream Linux kernel so I cant see how they could claim any substantial damages let alone $3 billion.
In addition to this point it will be argued that regardless of the contract position NUMA and RCU are not integral parts of UNIX and could be applied to any operating system being add-on "features" and hence can not be regarded as derivative works.
Is n't the Pentium M just a tweaked Pentium III at a smaller feature size? In which case it did n't take much from Intel but then again competition is good even if it loses.
They did when Linus was there and it ran *slower* because the VLIW instruction set could not exploit enough parallelism at compile-time. Itanium also has the same problems.
This wont mean anything in court because the act of selling something does n't mean you had the right to sell it in the first place.
Look at it this way, lets say I claim to own the rights to Windows and sell 1,000,000 licenses, it does n't validate any claim. 1,000,000 may have believed what I said but it does n't make my claims any more right.
In fact if anything this could be used by IBM as evidence of SCO strong-arm tactics.
You could attach "very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people" to some of the most talented people in history. I dont think it's restricted to tech.
It could be maybe that IT allows people who may not be comfortable talking face to face due to lack of social interaction to communicate with other people more easily.
Nearly every product goes through changes through it's life time.
For example cars goes through numerous changes, eg BMW 520i goes from being 2.0 litre to 2.2 litre in capacity but still marketed as 520i.
Keeping to the computers your Pentium would have changed and be of a different stepping. Even Play Stations.. going through revisions to make it cheaper to produce (3 chips to 1 chip) and so on. As long as it continues doing what it says it does I dont see the problem.
Re:here in partyplace
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Hold on, you're at a venue with thousands of people yet using IRC?:-P
This is one for the MS-SCO conspiracy people. SCO suing the US federal gov is a great for Microsoft, they can now point at this and say "I told you so".
Even if (well more like when) SCO lose, Microsoft can now bring up this case when it comes to any kind of OSS competition with regards to government contracts they will just say:
"Hey remember that whole SCO thing? How do you know it won't happen again but next time with a valid claim?"
Did Caldera ever make any large amount of money from their Linux distro? Or are they still around because of the settlement from MS with regards to the DR-DOS case. If this is the case then why bother developing a product when you can make money by just sueing people?
No one goes to court believing they are not the injured party especially from a lawyers point of view.
Come any trial I fully expect Darl McBride to put on the water works and explain how "disappointed" he is with all this and how it's taking him away from the charitable work he does with disabled children/homeless people/random good cause.
Well if you cant buy one it's probably because they cant sell you one due to legal reasons not because they dont want to. Since when have companies refused to take customers money, especially for what in essence is just piece of paper?
Disclaimer, this could be totally wrong but AFAIK:
If a company goes bankrupt then the liquidators that are called in would basically sell off all the companies assests in order to pay back anyone the company owes money too.
If the company went into volantary liquidation and there are no outstanding debts then anything left over is split between the shareholders. It depends if the code was actually accounted for as an asset whilst the company was being liquidated. If it was n't and you go on to make money off this code then you could end up being sued.
Well considering the US is spending something like $1 billion a week occupying Iraq if capturing/killing Saddam shortens their stay by just one day than it works out quite cheap.
However this is a big if, capturing Saddamn may not make any difference what-so-ever.
If this can be used to detect for example buffer overflows than does n't it also help speed up a crackers turn around rate?
I mean instead of trying to find flaws instruction by instruction with some debugger, simply specify all exe and dll's in your %winroot% directory press start and wait for the report and then manually inspect hilighted areas.
How much of the desktop market is made up corporate machines? Now that PC's are a commodity it can't be that much.
On the flip side corporate deals must be a cash cow since alot of money is spent on support, of course RedHat wont be seeing anything from those clandestine installs.
Derive is definitely the word here, according to my dictionary it is "to draw or be drawn (from) in source or origin".
Linux in its self is probably safe here as the Santa Cruz Organisation never seeked to use litigation against Linux.
JFS, NUMA and RCU from a technical point of view are just add-on's to a system. JFS itself coming from OS/2 (OS/2 derived from Sytem V?). NUMA was obtained when IBM purchased Sequent and RCU is just a method of multual exclusion that speeds up locking for systems with lots of CPU's. None of these are derived from System V, they are just "features" bolted onto AIX/Linux/Kitchen sink OS.
Regardless of JFS, NUMA and RCU, AIX may be a derivative of System V but that does n't mean that any new technology they add is automatically owned by SCO unless there is some kind of contract that states that(Project Monterey?). When contributing to Linux IBM where very careful not to contribute anything directly from AIX hence JFS code was from OS/2 and not AIX.
To use derive in this sense would be like me saying two totally different cars can be a derivitive of another by sharing the same spoiler.
I thought this stopped being about just code a long time ago. SCO keep moving the goal posts, some of the claims I've read (may not be in cronological order):
- Linux has stolen SCO code inserted by IBM. - No one is allowed to create Unix-like OS's without paying us. - All operting systems owe their existance Unix, so we could sue others too. - JFS, NUMA, etc, technolgies dont belong to IBM, they broke contracts by contributing these. - SCO's Unix was no.1 on X86 until Linux came along, this could n't have happened without IBM's help. - All your Linux are belong to us, not just the Linux kernel but also the GNU tools. - It takes massive corpations and millions of dollars to make the kind of OS that Linux has become so IBM must have help them. Remember Linux is an OS put together by "Punk Ass Kids"
I'm sure there are others I cant recall at the moment. It's amazing how they've managed to twist the original claim of copyright violation to ownership of Linux and the demand of payment for Linux licenses. In hindsight we should have known, there are the guys who purchased DR-DOS just so they could sue MS (not that MS were in the right with regards to DR-DOS). They are also the same people who tried to bring out a per seat model for Linux (not to be confused with support contracts).
Slashdot Mirror
Also since smaller platters have less mass dont they generate less heat?
The Linux RCU code is not from AIX nor Dynix, please read this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74586&cid=6686 573
- 24-Copyr ights_Story01.html
Infact SCO admit they down own the copyrights to RCU, NUMA or JFS as per this story:
http://mozillaquest.com/Linux03/ScoSource
Cutting through the noise SCO are claiming that IBM can not add technology added to AIX to Linux it's more to do with contracts than copyrights.
C++ code in the linux kernel?!? heracy I say!
I've just had a look at the original RCU patches contributed by IBM for 2.4.1, (RCU web site, http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/rcupdate.html)
One of the copyright notices from a file:
Support for deferred freeing of memory using Read-Copy Update
mechanism.
Copyright (c) International Business Machines Corp., 2001
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Author: Dipankar Sarma [dipankar@sequent.com]
(Based on a Dynix/ptx implementation by
Paul Mckenney [paul.mckenney@us.ibm.com])
IBM aquired Sequent in 1999, the copyright notice on this file from 2001. The important thing is that this code is based on an implementation and not the actual original code as such this is not Dynix/pty code.
SCO could argue that since it is based on the code then it is actually a copy, however from what I have seen of the contract clauses (mainly from groklaw) IBM are free to use any knowledge/processes/etc gained from adding to AIX.
Probably the two pieces of code look similar and I can believe even the comments since the implementor had access to original code. In addition to this it could be argued that it would be impossible to implement the code without there being similarities or even being nearly identical in places. For example try implementing a bouble-sort/linked list/etc without the code looking similar.
The only thing left are the RCU patents and IBM own these.
Having looked at this now SCO's case is pretty thin, they could win of course nothing is impossible (though unlikely), however it would just be a case of copyright violation and someone outside of IBM could do a re-implementation of RCU. In addition since RCU is n't part of the mainstream Linux kernel so I cant see how they could claim any substantial damages let alone $3 billion.
In addition to this point it will be argued that regardless of the contract position NUMA and RCU are not integral parts of UNIX and could be applied to any operating system being add-on "features" and hence can not be regarded as derivative works.
Is n't the Pentium M just a tweaked Pentium III at a smaller feature size? In which case it did n't take much from Intel but then again competition is good even if it loses.
They did when Linus was there and it ran *slower* because the VLIW instruction set could not exploit enough parallelism at compile-time. Itanium also has the same problems.
This wont mean anything in court because the act of selling something does n't mean you had the right to sell it in the first place.
Look at it this way, lets say I claim to own the rights to Windows and sell 1,000,000 licenses, it does n't validate any claim. 1,000,000 may have believed what I said but it does n't make my claims any more right.
In fact if anything this could be used by IBM as evidence of SCO strong-arm tactics.
You could attach "very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people" to some of the most talented people in history. I dont think it's restricted to tech.
It could be maybe that IT allows people who may not be comfortable talking face to face due to lack of social interaction to communicate with other people more easily.
Nearly every product goes through changes through it's life time.
For example cars goes through numerous changes, eg BMW 520i goes from being 2.0 litre to 2.2 litre in capacity but still marketed as 520i.
Keeping to the computers your Pentium would have changed and be of a different stepping. Even Play Stations.. going through revisions to make it cheaper to produce (3 chips to 1 chip) and so on. As long as it continues doing what it says it does I dont see the problem.
Hold on, you're at a venue with thousands of people yet using IRC? :-P
This is one for the MS-SCO conspiracy people. SCO suing the US federal gov is a great for Microsoft, they can now point at this and say "I told you so".
Even if (well more like when) SCO lose, Microsoft can now bring up this case when it comes to any kind of OSS competition with regards to government contracts they will just say:
"Hey remember that whole SCO thing? How do you know it won't happen again but next time with a valid claim?"
They have been, security forces found a half finished one in the middle of the columbian jungle a few years back.
The trollers are out in force today it seems.
Did Caldera ever make any large amount of money from their Linux distro? Or are they still around because of the settlement from MS with regards to the DR-DOS case. If this is the case then why bother developing a product when you can make money by just sueing people?
No one goes to court believing they are not the injured party especially from a lawyers point of view.
Come any trial I fully expect Darl McBride to put on the water works and explain how "disappointed" he is with all this and how it's taking him away from the charitable work he does with disabled children/homeless people/random good cause.
Well if you cant buy one it's probably because they cant sell you one due to legal reasons not because they dont want to. Since when have companies refused to take customers money, especially for what in essence is just piece of paper?
Disclaimer, this could be totally wrong but AFAIK:
If a company goes bankrupt then the liquidators that are called in would basically sell off all the companies assests in order to pay back anyone the company owes money too.
If the company went into volantary liquidation and there are no outstanding debts then anything left over is split between the shareholders. It depends if the code was actually accounted for as an asset whilst the company was being liquidated. If it was n't and you go on to make money off this code then you could end up being sued.
The buying of Santa Cruz Operation by Caldera follows their previous "buy-to-sue" pattern of buying DR-DOS to sue Microsoft.
Caldera were not doing too well and even tried bringing out a "Per Seat" licensing model for their Linux distro.
I'd speculate they purchased the Unix rights and changed their name to SCO as part of this whole campaign.
Well considering the US is spending something like $1 billion a week occupying Iraq if capturing/killing Saddam shortens their stay by just one day than it works out quite cheap.
However this is a big if, capturing Saddamn may not make any difference what-so-ever.
If this can be used to detect for example buffer overflows than does n't it also help speed up a crackers turn around rate?
I mean instead of trying to find flaws instruction by instruction with some debugger, simply specify all exe and dll's in your %winroot% directory press start and wait for the report and then manually inspect hilighted areas.
Nope, the contract may say that you may not do this nor that you and you could only be sued for breaking a contract.
If it was illegal ie there was a law against reverse engineering, benchmarking, etc it would not be in the EULA.
Also just because something is in a contract does n't make it legally binding if the clause breaks laws.
How much of the desktop market is made up corporate machines? Now that PC's are a commodity it can't be that much.
On the flip side corporate deals must be a cash cow since alot of money is spent on support, of course RedHat wont be seeing anything from those clandestine installs.
Derive is definitely the word here, according to my dictionary it is "to draw or be drawn (from) in source or origin".
Linux in its self is probably safe here as the Santa Cruz Organisation never seeked to use litigation against Linux.
JFS, NUMA and RCU from a technical point of view are just add-on's to a system. JFS itself coming from OS/2 (OS/2 derived from Sytem V?). NUMA was obtained when IBM purchased Sequent and RCU is just a method of multual exclusion that speeds up locking for systems with lots of CPU's. None of these are derived from System V, they are just "features" bolted onto AIX/Linux/Kitchen sink OS.
Regardless of JFS, NUMA and RCU, AIX may be a derivative of System V but that does n't mean that any new technology they add is automatically owned by SCO unless there is some kind of contract that states that(Project Monterey?). When contributing to Linux IBM where very careful not to contribute anything directly from AIX hence JFS code was from OS/2 and not AIX.
To use derive in this sense would be like me saying two totally different cars can be a derivitive of another by sharing the same spoiler.
[Rant on]
I thought this stopped being about just code a long time ago. SCO keep moving the goal posts, some of the claims I've read (may not be in cronological order):
- Linux has stolen SCO code inserted by IBM.
- No one is allowed to create Unix-like OS's without paying us.
- All operting systems owe their existance Unix, so we could sue others too.
- JFS, NUMA, etc, technolgies dont belong to IBM, they broke contracts by contributing these.
- SCO's Unix was no.1 on X86 until Linux came along, this could n't have happened without IBM's help.
- All your Linux are belong to us, not just the Linux kernel but also the GNU tools.
- It takes massive corpations and millions of dollars to make the kind of OS that Linux has become so IBM must have help them. Remember Linux is an OS put together by "Punk Ass Kids"
I'm sure there are others I cant recall at the moment. It's amazing how they've managed to twist the original claim of copyright violation to ownership of Linux and the demand of payment for Linux licenses. In hindsight we should have known, there are the guys who purchased DR-DOS just so they could sue MS (not that MS were in the right with regards to DR-DOS). They are also the same people who tried to bring out a per seat model for Linux (not to be confused with support contracts).
[Rant off]