From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: norman@nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 16:39:31 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] Fwd: Helping in the battle against SCO
Message-ID: <20030915204355.EB9311E5D@minnie.tuhs.org>

Andru Luvisi:

  If SCO holds up a piece of common code and the good guys have no
  response, that is bad.

  If SCO holds up a piece of common code and the good guys already know
  that it actually came from BSD, and are prepared to demonstrate such,
  that is good.

  If SCO holds up a piece of common code and the good guys already know
  that it was contributed to Linux by SCO/Caldera themselves, and are
  prepared to demonstrate such, that is good.

  If there is infringing code, it should be taken out of Linux as quickly
  as possible.

======

I'll grant all those points, but if the idea is to defang SCO, the
effort still seems fruitless to me.

System V and Linux both contain appallingly large volumes of code.
(On a list that discusses the UNIX of the 1970s, perhaps I can say
that without creating undue ruckus.)  The odds are that quite a
lot of the code is similar.  Should we really spend months and months
tracking it all down and trying to declare where each line came from,
or should we wait until SCO declares a specific set of cases that matter
(as they must do sooner or later or abandon the court battle)?

When one is faced with an enormous set of possible computations, of
which only a handful are likely to be needed in the end, lazy evaluation
is usually the better choice.

It does seem sensible to me for the Linux community to do its best to
hunt down any infringing code, and to try to assess whether there's a
serious problem lurking that nobody had noticed.  But that ought to be
a matter of basic ethics, having nothing to do with SCO.  I doubt it
is likely to make much difference to the court battle anyway: SCO's
claim is that the infringing code is there now, that it was put there
deliberately at IBM's instigation to do harm to them, and that the harm
already exists; removing it now won't change any of that.  I think it's
a good idea to remove any infringements that are there now, even if they
are trivial ones; but let's not fool ourselves that it will pull SCO's
fangs to do so.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON