From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 10:07:46 +0930 Subject: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate In-Reply-To: <20030529.175639.34763729.imp@bsdimp.com> References: <20030529.063354.51702197.imp@bsdimp.com> <20030529235027.GE20321@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20030529.175639.34763729.imp@bsdimp.com> Message-ID: <20030530003746.GF20321@wantadilla.lemis.com> On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 17:56:39 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: > In message: <20030529235027.GE20321 at wantadilla.lemis.com> > "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" writes: >> On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 6:33:54 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: >>> In message: >>> Robert Tillyard writes: >> >>>> I believe the legal action is over breach on contract with IBM and >>>> not on copyright issues. >>> >>> All of SCO's statements to the court have been contractual. Their >>> statements to the press have been inflated to include things that >>> aren't actually alledged in the court filings. >> >> What's not very clear here is that there seem to be two issues. The >> IBM issue is, as you say, a contractual one which about which they >> have been remarkably vague. The suspension of Linux distribution is a >> different matter. From http://www.lemis.com/grog/sco.html: >> >> On Tuesday, 27 May 2003, I spoke to Kieran O'Shaughnessy, managing >> director of SCO Australia. He told me that SCO had entrusted three >> independent companies to compare the code of the UnixWare and Linux >> kernels. All three had come back pointing to significant >> occurrences of common code ("UnixWare code", as he put it) in both >> kernels. >> >> In view of the long and varied history of UNIX, I wondered whether >> the code in question might have been legally transferred from an >> older version of UNIX to Linux, so I asked him if he really meant >> UnixWare and not System V.4. He stated that it was specifically >> UnixWare 7. > > I base my statements on the legal filings that are available at the > SCO site. I do not base them on anything that SCO has said to the > press, since those statements are nearly universally overinflated. > Since these are statements to the press, or other public statements, I > trust them as much as I trust public statements by politicians. The trouble is that there *is* no legal filing on the Linux without IBM case. >>> That's the rub. Do they, in point of fact, actually have any code >>> they own the Copyright to or the patent rights to? >> >> ... > > I was speaking of SCO, not IBM. What code does SCO own the copyright > to? Ah, sorry. Got to pass on that one. They probably have the rights to XENIX. >> For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if SCO's claims were found to be >> true. > > Me too. There's another article that is saying that there are 10-15 > line snippets scattered all through the kernel. Give me a break. > That claim is so absurd as to be not credible on its face. I can see > one or two files, maybe stretching my disbelief to its limits, but I > can't see anything more pervasive than that. There are plenty of cases where you need to initialize a data structure. Many data structures are public knowledge, and initialization is a brainless enough task that the code could have been written independently and look almost the same. Does this line ring a bell? (*bdevsw[major(bp->b_dev)]->d_strategy) (bp); How many people have written that independently of each other? Greg -- Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available URL: