Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? 227
ansak writes "In the latest scoop from Groklaw, Groklaw user talks_to_birds pointed out an error in SCO's version of the famous Levenez Unix Timeline. The important error is the green dotted line which shows Minix to be a derivative of Unix. If this were accepted, and if Linux was shown to be a derivative of Minix, then SCO's lawsuits would be more likely to have merit. As it turned out, even MS called Samizdat unhelpful, but at least now there may be a plausible reason why someone would try to make the link between Minix and Linux in the first place."
simple... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you just go to Groklaw, they have tons of really good info on this, instead of just AC comments. Including links to the SCO chart showing how Linux is linked off of "SCO Linux"...
Re:simple... (Score:4, Informative)
Not that's wrong too. Tanenbaum wrote Minix form scratch.
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:5, Informative)
I think Minix was completely from scratch as well, and not fully POSIX, but close enough. The author of Minix is and was a college professor, whose sole motivation was to make a teaching tool (and appearantly make a few bucks to cover costs I guess...)
I also think that Linus began using the GNU/GPL within a year of starting the project.
Re:simple... (Score:3, Informative)
You missed a few! (Score:5, Informative)
- Andy told him so several times.
- Bruce Perens, editor of the Prentice Hall series cited by Brown, told him so.
- Robert Swartz, founder of Mark Williams Co, authors of Coherent, also told him so.
- Ilkka Tuomi and several other scientists and historians told him so.
- Richard Stallman told him so too.
- No less than Dennis Ritchie told him so.
There's a reasonably complete linkfarm on GrokLaw [groklaw.net], of course, and even more complete derivative at WikiPedia [wikipedia.org], including gems from their tobacco-whore days.But according to the SCO graph... (Score:2, Informative)
So why haven't they picked on the other 'derivatives' in the diagram? Surely it should be an all or nothing argument, not a 'pick the ones you want to fight' affair?
"SCO Darl Mcbride == IBM Scarred clod"
Minix is for teaching (Score:5, Informative)
Mike
Re:Minux had no unix code (Score:5, Informative)
Not strictly wrong Minix was written by one person, college professor Andy Tannenbaum, in order to teach Operating System design to students and be able to give them a real example to work with. Obviously paying $30,000/CPU for a student is not feasible so that was probably part of the motivation but being able to show a fully functional operating system was the main reason. Minix is sold with a book. It was never an open source project in the way we now know & love. Andy didn't apply patches regularly and didn't want to overburden the core of MINIX because it would reduce its' value as a teaching tool. Hence people became frustrated and LINUX was born.
Re:Minux had no unix code (Score:1, Informative)
Was This Not Obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Ken Brown in an email message to Dennis Ritchie:
This was a question Ken Brown asked while interviewing for his book. He obviously made his decision before he asked any questions at all.Tannenbaum also said that Ken Brown had not read any of the available books on the history of Unix. It looks like AdTI and SCO are working together on this. Then again, maybe SCO is just grabbing at straws tossed out by AdTI. Either way, this has to be targeted at the ignorant (read: politicians).
The funny thing is that these "theories" do not take into account the classic and widely known Linux anecdote which was Linus' very motivation for writing Linux: He did not even have working MINIX binaries when he wrote Linux because he had accidently overwritten his harddrive. So, he had two choices: buy MINIX again or write his own OS. That is a far cry from having possession of the MINIX source code.
Final Note: It is not like the Linux kernel was doing 3D graphics back then. It was a text based console with disc access. I doubt Ken Brown or SCO would have called it an operating system back then (this is not to say it was not amazing, just that these mud slingers cannot imagine a non GUI system -- they are lawyers, after all).
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Was This Not Obvious? (Score:1, Informative)
Anyway, it was enough to provoke a response from Mr. Brown. From his reply, it was obvious that he has an agenda. His reply implied that there would be retribution when the 'house of cards' [Linux and open source] come falling down. The retribution was not physical or violent, but I got the impression it would be something along the lines of sticking his tongue out and going "na-na-ni-na-na, told you so".
The bottom line was that Mr Brown did not write his book as an intellectual argument against the 'open source movement'. He wrote it starting with the dogmnatic position that the open source movement is against his beliefs (and financial interests) and he will write whatever is necessary, factual or not, to try and score a blow.
Re:MINIX to LINIX to LSD (Score:2, Informative)
Long live FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
Another note: back in 1992, AT&T sold the portion of the company that made their UNIX (UNIX Systems Laboratories - USL) to Novell, Inc.
SOURCE: The Complete FreeBSD 3rd Edition by Greg Lehey
Re:Minux had no unix code (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:2, Informative)
"Shut the fuck up, dickeater. You don't have any idea what the fuck you're talking about, do you?"
Don't get me wrong, 2.4 was a quantum leap...but Linux (and GNU, right...) was a very useful system long before that. If you'd have used it, you'd know that.
Re:to the best of my knowledge- (Score:3, Informative)
Malicious prosecution? [law.com]
Re:maybe not so simple... (Score:4, Informative)
It's pretty hard to be convicted of perjury. It has to be proven that you KNEW what you were saying was in fact not true AND your false testimony was material to the court case.
The punishments are pretty stiff. The problem is enforcement is usually limited to someone the system wants to bring down, rather than those who are playing it like a cheap guitar.
It's Minix! Repeat after me ... (Score:3, Informative)
Damn it, you guys, it's Minix!! Not Minux, not Munix ... Minix!
zRe:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:5, Informative)
Your post doesn't make much sense to me.
When Linux came out it needed a MINIMUM of a '386. In fact, that was one of Linus's main motivations -- Tanenbaum had refused to create a '386-based version of Minux, insisting that most students could only afford a '286-based machine. At the same point in time, BSD 2.X ran on PDP-11/70's with less than a megabyte of main memory -- and unlike the '386, the PDP-11 was entirely a 16-bit machine and didn't have demand paging. "Minicomputers" were already on the way out when Linux and 386BSD appeared since the chief performance differences between a mini and the '386's were (1) data-center grade peripherals and (2) a price tag more than an order of magnitude larger.
Of course, the 2.X series of BSD Unix was a dead end (who wants 16-bit Unix based on a platform that was EOL'd nearly twenty years ago?), but it shows that BSD once ran with resources that are probably quite a bit less than the average PDA of today.
To make this a little closer to the article's topic: the ABI of Bell Labs Unix was so widely known (and not just via the Lions book -- it's all in the man pages) that neither Tanenbaum nor Linus needed any knowledge of Unix internals whatsoever to replicate it. Furthermore, substantially all the details of those internals were published in Bell System Technical Journal articles and elsewhere. This is why the court found in the USL vs. Regents (BSD) suit that the cat was already out of the bag.
Re:The Diagram Is Not Measuring Source Dependancy (Score:3, Informative)
i'm also not sure the placement of the fork is accurate - i think it should fork off some time between v9 and v10, but i'm seeking confirmation - but that's not really relevant.
the point is the chart's just being used as a nice visual aid for SCO - the "link" is entirely their own fabrication.
Re:PS. (Score:3, Informative)
UTC aka GMT (close enough for us mere mortals anyway) aka zulu time is the time at the greenwich meridian, 0 longitude, and the international date line is at 180 longitude. If I'm not mistaken that would put roughly half the time zones before and half after UTC (at least there should be the same number (+/- 1) of whole-hour time zones on either side of UTC, I think there are a few time zones with fractional-hour offsets).
Re:maybe not so simple... (Score:2, Informative)
When I served my turn at jury duty for my city, I was amazed at how quickly everything went. And it was for a murder trial.
The prosecutor told us that murder trials in our jurisdiction usually take a day. Those epic murder trials are reserved for media circus venues like L.A.
Sure enough, we were all wrapped up right after lunch, with DNA expert testimony and everything.
I would have never guessed I would be picked for the jury--white male, whose step father is in law enforcement. With a black male defendant.
Anyways the guy was found not guilty, the prosecution wasn't able to prove anything other than the guy's blood was on the head of the wrench clutched by the victim's dead hand. You need a lot more than that to prove murder, so the judge dismissed the case.
defintely not from same source (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not plausible (Score:3, Informative)