[TUHS] SCO sues IBM?

[wes.parish@paradise.net.nz (Wesley Parish)]

Well, the impression I got from IBM re: AIX and Linux's relationship, was that 
they were going to give AIX a Linux makeover so that they could maintain an 
apparently unified Un*xish shop - as far as AIX and Linux _are_ Un*ces, that 
is!

How that gets interpreted as importing Un*x trade secrets into Linux, I have 
no idea.

I also thought IBM was going to allow some of their mainframe high 
availability ideas to influence Linux - not through direct porting of the 
code - VM/ESA is apparently written in PL/I, and I doubt that most Linux 
programmers would touch that with a barge-pole.  And a waldo at a workplace 
on a planet on the other side of the galaxy.  Or universe.

I myself wanted to get some information on the internal structure - ie, the 
part that gets passed between the SFS client and the Reusable Kernel Server - 
of the VM/ESA Shared File System way back when, and was told in no uncertain 
terms, not to bother trying.

I don't see SCO has much chance of doing anything except causing a bit of 
unwelcome disruption and - I hope - getting bought out at bargain basement 
prices by IBM and getting the entire Un*x source tree BSDed or LGPLed to stop 
all this useless nonsense at the "source".  Or at the "sauce", to give it a 
rather appropriate spin.

Wesley Parish

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 12:45 pm, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
<snip>
>
> I am very sure that IBM has not put any UNIX code into Linux.  For one
> thing, it's not their style, and in fact they keep the AIX and Linux
> people very separate.  Last year I wrote a clone of AIX's JFS file
> system on Linux for IBM.  This is the old JFS, not the JFS they
> released under GPL.  I was not allowed to see the AIX source code, for
> exactly the reasons of the complaint.  The only information I had were
> the header files they distribute with the development system.
>
> The AIX code wouldn't have helped, anyway.  Linux is not UNIX, as
> anybody who's done kernel programming in both knows.  I had thought
> that this childish superstition about the holiness of source code
> would have been stamped out at the end of the last UNIX wars.
>
> Greg

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