[TUHS] Fwd: Helping in the battle against SCO

[grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey)]

On Wednesday, 10 September 2003 at 19:59:07 -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> I don't see how any diffing we do will make any difference `in the
> battle against SCO.'

It could.  There's a lot of confusion out there.  The people on this
list have a much better understanding of the technical issues than
just about any other group of people I can think of.

> If we find cases in which Linux has incorporated System V licensed
> code, that will certainly be meaningful; but if, as seems likely, we
> don't, SCO can just say their tools are better than hours.

FWIW, the first example that SCO showed in Las Vegas on 18 August does
appear to be derived from System V.3 malloc().  See
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html for the details.
Also, if anybody else can confirm or deny my analysis based on code
inspection, I'd be *very* grateful.

Summary: the first example showed a slightly modified version of Third
Edition malloc() being used for a slightly different purpose in the
SGI ia64 port only.  The slight modifications tracked those in System
V.3, suggesting that SGI derived their code from System V, and not
from an earlier version.  On the other hand, the differences in System
V.3 were removed again, and in fact the Linux community had already
removed the entire code before SCO "revealed" it.

> And besides, it is SCO who have brought the complaint, so both
> legally and ethically it's up to SCO to prove the case, not up to
> others to disprove it, no matter what fearsome roars SCO emit.

No question.

Greg
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