[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 6:32 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> I had people relate to me, at least once, cases of utterly independent
> implementations of a function that were byte for byte the same, as found in
> one court case a friend of mine (now deceased) got pulled into. He had to
> prove he'd written his code from scratch. But these were pretty simple
> functions. I don't know if bmap qualifies ...
>
> How could this happen? I don't know, but the court case that long predated
> SCO. The only conclusion I can reach
> is that when enough techniques, ideas, mailling lists, discussions, and
> documents become part of a shared culture, the code which
> people create might be the same. A weird parallel evolution of code.
>

This is the legal principle of sene. a faire: some things are just endemic
to the genre that they have no copyright protection. If there's no other
way (or other sane way) to implement something, then two people can (and
do) reimplement it w/o there being any copyright infringement. There's a
complicated way to break down code into its parts, and see what was copied
vs what's necessary to implement an algorithm (which has no copyright
protection, and no patent protection in the era we're talking about).

It's what keeps the lawyers employed.

Warner


>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 5:09 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> The thing I never got a reasonable answer to was I found code in BSD that
>> was identical to code going back to at least V7.  Find bmap() in the UFS
>> code and then find the same in V7.  I might be wrong about V7, might be
>> 32V, might be V6.  I don't think it matters, it's the same in all of them.
>>
>> bmap() is the code that maps a logical block to a phsyical block,
>> I'm quite familiar with it because I rewrote it to bmap_write() and
>> bmap_read() as part of making UFS do extents:
>>
>> http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
>>
>> When all the lawsuits were going on, since I knew that code really well,
>> I went off and looked and the BSD code at that time had bit for bit
>> identical bmap() implementations.
>>
>> I never understood why BSD could claim they rewrote everything when they
>> clearly had not rewritten that.
>>
>> I've raised this question before and I just went and looked, bmap() has
>> changed.  I'm pretty sure I have Kirk's BSD source releases, if I do,
>> I'm 100% sure I can back up what I'm saying.  Not sure I care enough to
>> do so, it's all water under the bridge at this point.
>> --
>> ---
>> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
>> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>>
>

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