SCO's Next Target: SGI?

FatRatBastard writes "ZDNet News is speculating that SCO's next target in its legal actions against Linux may be SGI. According to the article its legal strategy will be to claim that XFS is a Unix derivative and therefore under SCO control, much like they claim JFS is in their suit with IBM. One fact not mentioned in the article that would support SGI being the next target is the malloc code they claimed was infringing at this years SCOForum was copyrighted SGI."

What a useful article

[Overly Critical Guy]

A link to ZDNet speculation about what might be SCO's next target. Slow news day? Needed another SCO fix?

AAARGGHH

[LS]

Jesus Christ Fuck! When is someone going to lob a mortar into the SCO offices and put an end to this fucking insanity?!!??!

Re:Must be the drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one cannot wait for the invoice to arrive from SCO...

Oh, I can't wait for SCO to try and invoice one of the big FreeBSD users like Yahoo. USL, who SCO bought, gave us a free pass as part of the settlement of the USL vs. UC Berkeley lawsuit. Can't wait to see how these slippery little shits talk their way past that. Has anyone reported these fuckers to the SEC for running a "Pump and Dump" scam?

flaw in your logic

[SHEENmaster]

SCO OpenServer is quite broken, and they have yet to give it away.

Something is Terribly Wrong

[NJVil]

A change in Darl's approach might be needed soon.

Even with the latest announcement threatening to litigate, SCO's stock price is not up. Perhaps investors are finally wising up now that Darl and his fellow execs have already dumped most of their stock.

Hey, it's possible!

How moderate...

[greppling]

From the article:

The company has shown a recent preference for more moderate courses of action, such as sending invoices to Linux users rather than taking them to court.

Wow. How bad must you behave until sending out invoices to end users, without backing up your claims by any substantial public explanations, is considered a "moderate course of action"???

Further confirmation SGI had IP concerns re: XFS

[LinuxParanoid]

Six months after its announcement it would release XFS, IP issues were still a concern. A Slashdot thread [slashdot.org] refers to comments made by Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy in a (now-linkdead) article, saying:

"SGI will devolve elements of its proprietary software and operating system Irix, such as its XFS journalling file system,to Linux as soon as it clears the legal roadblocks surrounding the intellectual property. ... 'As the code is cleaned, we will release it,' [McAllister] said."

That said, I'm at a loss to explain how SGI stuffed things like that ancient malloc.c into Linux. Perhaps things got sloppy or it was never noticed because someone had previously removed copyright notices? (Apparently this has been a problem at SCO as well, removing BSD license notices internally...)

You know, the ironic thing about this whole SCO uproar is that people have long bitched that the GPL was so viral... well look how viral the closed source SVR4/5 license apparently was!

--LP

P.S. A short history of XFS and Linux, Slashdot-style:

Here's a LinuxToday [linuxtoday.com] article and the original Slashdot thread [slashdot.org] covering that May 20, 1999 announcement.

Three months later, in August 1999, Slashdot covered that the XFS donation would be GPL [slashdot.org] (not just 'open source')

A year after that, the XFS beta arrived [slashdot.org] on Slashdot (September 2000), and

After two more years, XFS was merged into the Linux 2.5 kernel [slashdot.org] September 2002.

Re:Enough Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a "troll", it's satire.

It's extremely sad that Slashdot's troll obsession has come to this. I'm surprised you also didn't call it "FUD" ;-)

Yuk Yuk - Bring 'em on! (Former SGI guy speaks)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe, bring 'em on. If you're going to pick a F/S to attack, XFS is a perfect choice for SCO. It was developed independently, and I'd love to see SCO find one shread of old unix F/S tech besides the word 'vnode' in there. You go SCO! [Disclaimer, I only worked with the project back when it was an SGI-only system, who knows what happened during the Linux port].

I think someone at SCO noticed that SGI had a SysV license (the later versions of SGI's IRIX had a good hunk of licensed SysV in there - same goes for the Solaris folks, I think everyone moved to SysV in the early 90's when it looked like 'the thing' to do).

It'll be a good stretch for SCO to claim that XFS is a derived work in any real form. The only overlapping code would be the vnode entry points and some things related to the buffer cache, and those you really have no choice but to implement the SysV interfaces and that's easy to prove (maybe .1% or less of the FS code involved). The rest of XFS is a huge original undertaking. There's nothing quite like it (B-trees everywhere).

Re:What a useful article

[MuParadigm]

I've been wondering about this myself. SGI does seem to be a likely target for SCO, given SCO's rhetoric. But SGI doesn't have much, if any, money. So it seems unlikely from that point of view.

Another thing that bothered me in the ZD Net article is that they don't mention the other file systems. Let's face it, JFS and XFS are not the most popular journaling file systems for Linux; they're mostly used by companies that have legacy file systems they need to support. ReiserFS, Ext3, and Ext2, are the most popular file systems. If Linux lost the ability to support XFS and JFS, all it would do is make migration to Linux more difficult for some companies. It probably wouldn't much affect adoption rates.

Anyway, I suspect that SGI should start talking to Red Hat about accessing some of that Open Source Now! fund. Just in case.

I'm not crazy! Really!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not me who is crazy. It's everybody else that is crazy!

Sounds exactly like what SCO is doing right now.

SCO and the state of other operatingsystems

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently the whole SCO business is working as a smokescreen that captures a lot of oss developers/peoples time and energy, this is probably taking our focus from the list of things that needs to be fixed for linux and the bsd's to stay ahead or aleast not long after the other competitors. Just as we speak right now microsoft is probably gnawing away (or atleast trying) market share from linux and the unices while SCO is keeping all our eyes elsewhere.

So stop giving a rats ass about what darl mcbride is up to, it's just been a lot of barking from that puppy and the energy complaining about him and the company he work's for could be better used for code/documentation or userfriendlier configurations, because even if you don't know how to program your way out of a wet-paperbag (not that it's very common here on /.) you can always write documentation or configure things so they look nicer and then resubmit the new configs to the developers so that the changes get spread.

So ask yourself, what have you done for gnu or opensource software lately, and what COULD you do?
If we all start helping we could keep our advantage against windows and some closed source unices but the current state of opensource software wasn't created by flaming and complaining on how many faults our "competitors" have, but by acutally producing something better.