Re: M$ attack on Common Sense

From: Ed Murphy (emurphy42_at_socal.rr.com)
Date: 09/14/03 

Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 01:16:14 GMT

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 23:12:51 +0000, User wrote:

> My understanding is that SCO is only claiming it own a very small segment of
> code but it resides in amongst the kernel code so is on all linux machines.
> They don't claim they own "millions of lines of Linux source code".

SCO's claims are so unclear and inconstant that it's hard to
say. They claim ownership of several different concepts, yet
they refuse to identify the offending code except under a
career-crippling NDA. The one example that's reached the
public so far is laughable, because

a) Out of about 100 lines of source code, about 97 of them were
   written by Dennis Ritchie (one of the proponents of the C
   programming language, in which boatloads of software is
   written - including Windows) in the 1970s, has been published
   in multiple textbooks, and was released to the public domain
   on *two separate occasions* by previous corporate incarnations
   of SCO.

b) The example pertained only to certain models of SGI
   workstations, so it wasn't even compiled/used on the
   vast majority of computers.

c) The example was already being removed from the 2.6 kernel
   (because it was redundant, with respect to a different
   block of code, hence "ugly") *before* SCO revealed it!

Here's a document that dissects SCO's claims in considerable detail:

http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html

Relevant Pages

  • Re: M$ attack on Common Sense
    ... > code but it resides in amongst the kernel code so is on all linux machines. ... SCO's claims are so unclear and inconstant that it's hard to ... and was released to the public domain ...
    (comp.os.ms-windows.nt.admin.security)
  • Re: M$ attack on Common Sense
    ... > code but it resides in amongst the kernel code so is on all linux machines. ... SCO's claims are so unclear and inconstant that it's hard to ... and was released to the public domain ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)