[TUHS] Re: SCO's "evidence" (was: RIP Darl McBride former CEO of SCO)

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 5:06 PM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

> By evidence, I mean evidence that was part of the legal case(s). Material
> presented as a part of a marketing, sales, or public relations effort is
> not evidence in this sense. I don't know what Darl McBride and SCO were
> doing here, as I didn't work on that and only met Darl for 30 sec. (He came
> over to say hello to me in a conference room, and then the lawyers came
> over and told him to get away from me, for fear that he would pollute the
> waters. I worked extensively with his brother, Kevin.) My understanding is
> that SCO was trying to get money from Linux licenses of some sort. The
> Linux community freaked out.
>
> There were two principal legal cases. The first alleged copyright
> infringement in the development of Linux. I'm not sure who exactly was
> being sued, since I didn't work on this case. People tended to think that
> "Linux" was being sued, but I don't think there was any such entity like
> that. The second case, which I worked on, was about breach of contract
> between IBM and AT&T, and SCO I guess took on the rights and obligations of
> AT&T. This second case was extraordinarily complicated and, inasmuch as
> most everything about it was sealed, Groklaw and people in general never
> did understand what the issues were. Which, of course, didn't serve as an
> impediment for them offering up opinions about it. This second case started
> about 2005 and ended about two or three years ago, so it went on for about
> 15 years. The copyright case I think ended when it was determined that the
> copyrights in question didn't belong to SCO.
>
> The way the copyright case ended doesn't mean that Linux development
> didn't violate copyrights. I'm pretty sure that it did, based on
> conversations with a friend of mine who was a technical expert on that part
> of the case. One might ask, how could Torvalds and all those Linux
> developers violate System V copyrights since they had never seen System V
> code? The answer is that corporations such as IBM also contributed to
> Linux, and those corporations did have such access.
>

Everybody on the internet has had "access" to System V code (or almost any
mainstream Unix source code) since the mid to late 90s. None of it was
likely legal access, but it was and still is findable with google or other
search engines. But it does make similar looking things a muddier option if
you assume ill intent and deception.


> If one wants to take all this seriously and differentiate between what one
> knows to be true, on the one hand, and what one thinks is true or wants to
> be true, on the other hand, then I think one would realize that nobody
> outside of the legal teams knows anything about the case. As I said, I know
> a whole lot about part of the case(s) and next to nothing about the other
> parts. Groklaw used to reprint redacted documents that had been released by
> the court, a couple of which I wrote, but ignored the fact that they were
> redacted and that all the juicy parts were missing. Generally, if anything
> was important, it was sealed.
>
> I just a few minutes ago glanced at the Wikipedia article "SCO–Linux
> disputes" and it's not bad. It does pretty much explain the breach of
> contract case. There is a section titled "IBM code in Linux" that lists
> some technologies (e.g., JFS, RCU), and that's the area that I worked on. I
> wrote a program that could in effect do a "diff" on entire operating
> systems, hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was amazing to see the
> results. Even the attorneys who were doing the suing were amazed. (Whether
> all my discoveries represented actual breach of contract is a legal
> question, not a technical one, and was therefore well outside the scope of
> my work.)
>

True, but not all evidence of copying is evidence of a copyright violation.
One can say things look similar, but one needs to do a legal analysis to
know if said copying or apparent copying rises to the level of infringement
or not. Once issues like fair use, de minimis copying and scene a faire get
involved, it gets quite complicated to answer the legal question, even if
on its surface it looks like it might be copying, maybe with attempts to
conceal (since it may just be that all bubble sorts look alike once you
strip them down to semantic parts). Is it just another book about hunting
whales? Or is it too similar to Moby Dick?

Since there was no final judgement, but a negotiated settlement, we don't
have any satisfying answers.

Warner


> Marc
>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 3:50 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
>
>> On Monday,  4 November 2024 at 10:35:40 -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>> > Many opinions of the evidence, especially on Groklaw, but also
>> > elsewhere, including here. But none of these people offering
>> > opinions have really seen the evidence,
>>
>> I think that depends on what SCO (and when) claimed as evidence.  They
>> did present slides of obfuscated code (replacing ASCII with Greek
>> letters in the assumption that nobody could recognize the original and
>> maybe that the code was too precious to show in the orignal).  I can't
>> find that any more, and maybe its on one of the many dead links on
>> http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/.  But
>> http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.php refers to it and
>> identifies the errors in the claims.
>>
>> > Mostly people talk about "evidence " offered by Darl at the
>> > start. But NONE of the actual evidence came from him. It was
>> > researched by a team of expert witnesses on both sides, of which I
>> > was one.
>>
>> I'd be very interested to hear what else they presented.  Did your
>> conclusions agree with mine?
>>
>> Greg
>> --
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>
>
> --
> *My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*
>

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