[TUHS] Re: TUHS digest, Vol 1 #159 - 12 msgs

[grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)]

On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 19:42:53 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I do not have knowledge of the code it is that SCO says infringes.

Which puts you in the same boat as the rest of us.

> But I suspect that there is at least some merit to what they are
> claiming.  I have to believe that nobody is stupid enough to have
> zero data and jump out in public like they are doing.  That's just
> way too far over the top.  Anything is possible I guess, but doesn't
> it seem just a little unlikely that a corporation would commit that
> public a suicide?

It's certainly unlikely, agreed.  But SCO has done some unlikely
things recently.  You saw the public threat to sue Linus Torvalds
personally?

> I'd like to think I'm smarter than they are but I tend to doubt it,
> they have more experience.

As far as I can see (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), most of
the key players at SCO have changed over the last 12 months.  They
appear to have few engineers left, which is presumably one reason why
they gave the UnixWare and Linux code to outsiders to compare.  I'm
not convinced of their understanding of the matters at hand.  For
example, last year Caldera released "ancient UNIX" under a BSD-style
license, but now they're claiming it never happened.  Maybe they don't
know about the company history.  And if the code in dispute is derived
from ancient UNIX, there'll be egg on their face.  

Of course, a simple comparison doesn't show the origin of the code.
If it proves to have been lifted from Linux, they'll *really* look
stupid.

Greg
--
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