Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Caldera Government Software The Courts Your Rights Online Linux News

Linus Blasts SCO's Header Claims 599

jonbryce writes "Linus has responded to the latest claims made by SCO in their letter to the Fortune 1000 companies. Basically, he wrote the code himself, and it has been there since Linux 0.0.1. No copying from BSD or any other source." You can also read his comment to the Linux kernel mailing list, which reads in part "I think we can totally _demolish_ the SCO claim that these 65 files were somehow 'copied.' They clearly are not."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linus Blasts SCO's Header Claims

Comments Filter:
  • Trifecta (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:20PM (#7790839)
    Wow, it's a bloody SCO story trifecta day today! :)
    • Re:Trifecta (Score:5, Funny)

      by reality-bytes ( 119275 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:21PM (#7790843) Homepage
      Its a special Christmas present just for Slashdot :)
    • Re:Trifecta (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Elektroschock ( 659467 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:38PM (#7791413)
      unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw. It is very obvious for us that SCOs claims are baseless, but obviously not for mainstream press.
      • Here's a fix. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @10:25PM (#7791944) Journal
        unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw. It is very obvious for us that SCOs claims are baseless, but obviously not for mainstream press.

        So when you see a journalist who is clueless, write a letter (to his editor if you can't figure out how to contact him)

        - politely correcting him,
        - linking to the most authoritative postings (i.e. Linus' letter) refuting SCO's claim that you can find, and
        - pointing out sites (such as groklaw and slashdot) where a truth-squad is digging out and posting refutations as fast as SCO makes up another claim.

        And don't sweat it if a lot of other people do it too. The more the merrier. (It creates an unspoken subtext: "If a LOT of people know this, Mr, Reporter, why don't you?")

        Reporters don't like to be played for fools. It ruins their reputations and hurts their carreers. Some polite letters turning them on to new sources could get a couple of them posting our side of the story - if only for the appearance of balance. And once one or two do that, any of the rest that don't follow along look like idiots - so the herd stampeeds.

        Imagine the whole establishment media looking at SCO's claims, through a microscope, skeptically.
      • Re:Trifecta (Score:5, Informative)

        by annodomini ( 544503 ) <lambda2000@yahoo.com> on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @01:09AM (#7792636) Homepage
        Creator of Linux Defends Its Originality [nytimes.com]

        They seem to read LKML, at least.

        • by TheMidget ( 512188 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @03:47AM (#7793094)
          You know the song. However, given that you have the correct title, just paste it into Google news [google.com] and click on the link.

          Interestingly enough, the URL google uses is the same! Hmmm. So if you have a browser that allows you to customize the Referer header, you'll probably be able to access the article by just setting it to google, without actually going to Google News before...

          Yes, indeed, it works!:

          > telnet www.nytimes.com 80
          Trying 199.239.136.200...
          Connected to www.nytimes.com.
          Escape character is '^]'.
          GET /2003/12/23/technology/23linux.html HTTP/1.0
          Host: www.nytimes.com
          Referer: http://news.google.com

          ...
          Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular Linux computer operating system, defended his work yesterday as not always lovely but original - and certainly not copied, as a Utah company has contended.
          ...

      • Re:Trifecta (Score:5, Funny)

        by sjvn ( 11568 ) <sjvnNO@SPAMvna1.com> on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @03:01AM (#7792972) Homepage
        >unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw

        Dank! I guess I'll have to stop reading Slashdot and GrokLaw now. ;-)

        Steven
        • Re:Trifecta (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Elektroschock ( 659467 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @04:15AM (#7793169)
          Fact is that SCO's statements are professional media statements, they are designed and distributed trogh the channel. And obviously mainstream journalists are too stupid to get that it is all crap. Solution: Write professional media statements, facts don't count.
    • by glassesmonkey ( 684291 ) * on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @01:34AM (#7792738) Homepage Journal
      THIS IS NOT A JOKE.. Look at the SCO Job Postings:
      Job Title: Director of Financial Reporting and SEC/GAAP Compliance
      Posted 08 December, 2003
      Job Responsibilities:
      * Financial reporting of quarterly and annual results in accordance with SEC rules and regulations
      * Filing of registration statements and other periodic filings as required
      * Drafting and review of quarterly and annual reports
      * Assist in the preparation of registration and proxy statements and any other filings
      * Monitoring of the Company's compliance with current SEC, FASB and other regulatory literature that pertains to accounting and financial reporting

      I can't imagine why the last guy quit! Any takers??!!?
  • by SailorBoy ( 26009 ) * <eisen@@@dunhackin...org> on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:21PM (#7790841) Homepage
    Don't we need to inspect all the patches applied to these files and make sure that they were from sources that are as clean as the original code?
  • by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:22PM (#7790855) Homepage Journal
    I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing I worked with more coders like Linus Torvalds. How many times have we programmers found some code that didn't work like it should, asked the original coder about it, and had our heads bitten off for daring to suggest that there was anything sub-optimum about their baby?

    Mr. Torvalds, on the other hand, shows his value by his honesty:

    - I wrote them [ctype.h] (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so ;) ... So there is definitely a lot of proof that my ctype.h is original work.

    It's like a doctor admitting a misdiagnosis to the patient... a wizard willing to work on Dorothy's side of the curtain. I hope that I'm as honest about my code as Linus -- and that my management continues to understand that you don't get good code by pretending you never make mistakes.
  • by Charles Kerr ( 568574 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:24PM (#7790869) Homepage
    Linus' analysis spawned a masterful trolling Subject header on the Yahoo message board for scox: Linus caught - confessing to be ashamed [yahoo.com]. Nevermind that Linus' shameful confession wasn't copying code, but rather that his Linux 0.01 implementation of ctype wasn't threadsafe. Such beautiful spin. Darl would be proud. :)
  • by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:25PM (#7790877) Journal
    It is obvious that SCO (trying to keep up it's inflated stock price) is issuing ridiculous claims about once a week. Given the amount of time that we have until they have to put up or shut up during a trial we can look forward to more of Darl's comedic stylings in the form of outlandish claims.

    In case you're curious about where to get shares to short SCOX, Vanguard has them.
  • Waste of *#$% time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Camel Pilot ( 78781 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:25PM (#7790881) Homepage Journal
    Linus probably spent the better part of the day responding to this SCO sillyness. What a waste of time. SCO should somehow be made to pay for there frivolous bullshit!

    • Like suing them? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:10PM (#7791240)
      Linus probably spent the better part of the day responding to this SCO sillyness. What a waste of time. SCO should somehow be made to pay for there frivolous bullshit!

      You mean, like, say, suing them?

      The business world doesn't go by what people say on linux-kernel. Or what is said to various computer mags. No, it goes off of legal action. Linus and company need to recognize that they MUST DEFEND THEIR WORK LEGALLY. Given the sheer number of people whose work SCO has laid claim to, if they simply got off their asses and sued, SCO would be loosing the PR war and their lawyers would be tied up in litigation SCO doesn't want to be tied up in.

      Everything else is just a whole lot of hot air, regardless of how true it is. You've GOT TO STAND UP FOR YOUR WORK.

  • by euxneks ( 516538 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:25PM (#7790883)
    Isn't there some way to just shrug off SCO? I mean, it's like some annoying little man that constantly claims your head as his and is suing you for taking your head from him...
  • by idiotnot ( 302133 ) <sean@757.org> on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:27PM (#7790907) Homepage Journal
    "I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)"

    If SCO is big on claiming ugly code, I can only imagine what a convoluted mess UnixWarez actually is. :-)
  • by Eric Damron ( 553630 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:28PM (#7790910)
    and SCO is claiming copywrite over them, one can only assume that SCO is using Linus' code.

    Could SCO, not the Linux community, be afoul of the copyright laws?

    Code under the GPL is still covered by copyright law. In fact without the copyright, the owner of the code would not be able to license the code at all. If SCO is using Linus' code and not abiding by the license under which it was released then they are guilty of cival and possible criminal violations.
    • by stevesliva ( 648202 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:09PM (#7791236) Journal
      one can only assume that SCO is using Linus' code.
      You can't assume that! All you can assume is that SCO has again demonstrated they have no knowledge of the pedigree of simple, widely used code. Like SCO's malloc fiasco, it's another case of, "Linux has it, but we're older than Linux, so we had it first!" Wrong again, SCO.

      And again, none of the files mentioned seem to have anything to do with what SCO is suing IBM for! NUMA, RCU, SMP, JFS-- where are you???

    • GPL in proprietary? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:22PM (#7791316) Homepage Journal
      sue, maybe not, but subpoenate, requesting to reveal the infriging code, why not?

      I personally wonder, how many "close source" companies secretly and illegally include GNU-copyrighted code in their products, and sell it without source, violating GPL, but nobody knows they do, just because nobody ever sees the source.
  • by vkg ( 158234 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:28PM (#7790911) Homepage
    We already knew the entire case was FUD - and now there's a little more evidence, but it's not going to change the perception which SCO has created: that there's something shakey about Open Source.

    I don't see this blowing over until SCO is either acquired by IBM or countersued into oblivion...
  • by jaymzter ( 452402 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:28PM (#7790915) Homepage
    After reading Linus' code review of a younger Linus's work, it seems Tannenbaum was right.

    Tannenbaum: Linus, you fail it! 'F' for you!
  • by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:28PM (#7790917) Homepage Journal
    Extortion, bullying, lying, wasting the court's time, causing losses across an entire industry. When is a nice federal prosecutor going to knock on SCO's door and arrest someone?

    SCO, n: a concise example of everything that's wrong with IP laws. example: Want to see how the DMCA is broken, go look at the actions of a SCO. Also, a company who's only product is lawsuits. example: That SCO only showed a profit because they forced another company to settle out of court.
    SCO, v: to lie about a technical issue in an effort to increase stock prices while the upper management sell their stock. example: That company is SCOing, lookout.

  • A serious mistake (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:29PM (#7790924)
    If your strategy is built entirely on FUD and keeping the facts secret, revealing something like this list of 65 files publicly is a serious fuckup. I mean, it's pretty much trivial once the "infringing" locations are pointed to in this way to prove that that they are not infringing, to document their lineage in its entirety. Chalk up a loss to SCO on this one, they will come out looking like asses to the analysts on this one.


    Mind you, the mainstream press still doesn't know who to believe, since for them it's all greek. But anybody with even an inkling of an ability to read code can check these files out and follow Linus' discussion. And bits of information like this will make serious industry players fall squarely opposed to SCO (though the middle-manager types will still believe what they are spoon-fed by SCO, or rather be unable to analyze the argument sufficiently themselves to come to any conclusions). Bad SCO - very, very dumb.

    • by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:47PM (#7791074) Journal
      Darl didn't make a mistake - he was desperate. He needed some way to justify/cover up the fact that SCO owes its lawyers close to $10 million, and that their short-term liabilities have almost quadrupled since last year. SCO is in serious trouble, and investors were expecting to see him pull a seriously big rabbit out of his hat after delaying the earnings announcement for several weeks.

      That this is the best he could come up with means that SCO is going to have to pull a series of fast moves to try and keep the ball rolling in advance of the "show and tell" session that the court has ordered. Keep your eyes peeled for more incredible tales from the world of Canopy/SCO...
  • Groan.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OneFix at Work ( 684397 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:31PM (#7790941)
    I think we've clearly determined that SCO's claims (at least up till now) are completely baseless to the point of laughability. The problem here is that by Linus and various other open source figures discussing this, it almost gives credibility to their claims.

    I think it's time that this nonsense stop...by all means, Linus should talk with the IBM and Novell legal team if he is so inclined, but this is only giving SCO publicity...SCO knows that if they can get their name in the news (even in a negative light), it's still better than fading away...

    If news sites refuse to carry SCO's press releases, the whole thing would be moot...

    What really need to happen is the courts need to put a gag order on everyone involved with the case...IBM knows where to go if they need more information, but keeping SCO from making any more claims regarding Linux would stop this whole thing in its tracks...I'm not even talking about the validity of their accusations, just that they shouldn't be allowed to keep attacking IBM and the Linux community until they win their case in court...
    • Re:Groan.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by flossie ( 135232 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:17PM (#7791287) Homepage
      Assuming that we all know that SCO hasn't got a hope in hell, this whole episode could turn out to be very, very positive for GNU/Linux, despite the short term hassles.

      Firstly, for some strange reason, there seems to be a perception that the GPL needs to be tested in court before it is enforceable. I don't know where this perception comes from (it certainly isn't true) but Redhat vs. SCO is probably the best test case we could possibly hope for. No doubt that the GPL will prevail.

      Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, the trouncing that SCO gets will be a serious deterrent to other companies thinking that Linux is an easy target for litigation. No company in their right mind would want IBM's lawyers fighting them while IBM know that they are in the right. It gets even worse for litigants when they are attacked by other companies on other fronts - Redhat's GPL challenge, Novell's copyright entitlement challange. Basically, the message being sent out loud and clear is that despite the fact that Linux is seen as a hobbyists OS, there is serious commercial backing ready to defend it. And this backing is stronger because it comes from diverse organizations that do not even have to be consistent with each other in court. I really think that even cash-rich Microsoft would be concerned to be in SCO's position at the moment.

    • Re:Groan.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:20PM (#7791305) Homepage
      > What really need to happen is the courts need to
      > put a gag order on everyone involved with the case

      Gag orders are rare in US civil lawsuits for obvious reasons. Even if one were to be granted (IBM would have to ask for it) it would only cover statements having a direct bearing on the suit. Most of SCO's bloviations would therefor be exempt.

      > ...they shouldn't be allowed to keep attacking
      > IBM and the Linux community until they win their
      > case in court...

      Why do you believe that their bloviations will have any effect on the outcome of the case?

      Lying is not illegal and is only a tort if it harms someone. If you believe that their lies are damaging you sue them for libel.
    • Re:Groan.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @10:40PM (#7792026) Journal
      I think we've clearly determined that SCO's claims (at least up till now) are completely baseless to the point of laughability. The problem here is that by Linus and various other open source figures discussing this, it almost gives credibility to their claims.

      Not true.

      What would give credibility to their claims is letting them stand unopposed.

      Especially after the pins we've put in each of their trial balloons up to now. Sudden silence would convince observers that the latest sh*t was actually shinola. ... this is only giving SCO publicity...SCO knows that if they can get their name in the news (even in a negative light), it's still better than fading away...

      If news sites refuse to carry SCO's press releases, the whole thing would be moot


      But the news sites DON'T refuse to carry SCO's press releases. Given that, quickly countering and ridiculing them is the best move.
  • by caferace ( 442 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:33PM (#7790957) Homepage
    I can see the SCO press release now: "Linus Torvalds admits he is 'a bit ashamed' regarding our copyrighted code".
  • SCO's Angle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ljavelin ( 41345 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:36PM (#7790975)
    OK folks, now let's be realistic - SCO isn't looking for billions of dollars from "licenses", or even from IBM.

    No one would come up with such a poor plan for promoting their product, intellectual property, lawsuit, or anything else.

    So what is SCO doing? I think the answer is "Bad Marketing is better than No Marketing". In other words, SCO has nothing to lose.

    In SCO's worst case, they end up with nothing. That's just about where they started. Just about every other case is better

    Remember when Enron puked on America? What happened? Enron Corporate letterheads were being sold on eBay for a pretty penny! People wanted to BUY this crap because it was associated with the deplorable. And ya know what? SCO can do the same thing and make some serious money and fame.

    I wouldn't be surprised if the guys at SCO were secretly selling those "SCO Sucks" t-shirts. It's a great market, and they sell like hotcakes.
  • Too bad... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mekkab ( 133181 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:36PM (#7790982) Homepage Journal
    I'm sorry this whole SCO thing is starting to come to its inevitable, and glorious end.

    Yes, I wrote that right, I'm sorry.

    Its been a heck of a lot of fun bashing SCO. Now that Linus himself is back-hand slapping the shit out of them in a most satisfyingly public style, I can only think- what about next month, next year? By then folks, we'll have no SCO. It'll only be Microsoft and IBM/SUN (on alternating Thursdays) to bash around.

    SCO-y, we hardly knew ye
  • by Maul ( 83993 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:40PM (#7791013) Journal
    ...and I pronounce SCO as "Bullshit."
  • by Linux_ho ( 205887 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:40PM (#7791015) Homepage
    IBM Attorney: "We would like to present as exhibit 128 the letter SCO recently sent to the Fortune 1000. Note how they threaten huge financial liability while claiming ownership of the most basic, internationally standardized, publically available C header files, some practically identical form of which has been present in every modern operating system and software development platform for over a decade, and several of which are freely published in first-year programming textbooks."

    Mr. Boies: "I object!"

    Judge: "And why is that, Mr. Boies?"

    Mr. Boies: "Because it's devastating to my case, your honor!"
  • SEC complaint? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:43PM (#7791041) Homepage
    Has anyone taken the time to send an official complaint to the SEC? It seems VERY strange that these "revelations" always seem to co-inside with poor stock performance annoucements. It would seem that SCO is intentionally trying to boost it's stock performance by making clearly false statements. I do believe that would be illegal - fraudulent speech isn't protected by the first amendment. IANAL so - is it?

    AngryPeopleRule [angrypeoplerule.com]
    • Re:SEC complaint? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:46PM (#7791467) Homepage Journal
      I'm fairly certain that press releases do not have the direct connection to exchange of money necessary to be fraudulent. If they were actually investment advice, then they would be, but they aren't. All of their SEC filings, which do have to be true, seem to have been honest.

      If they actually demand money from anyone and actually accept it, that is fraud. However, that hasn't actually happened, much as they seem to suggest that it has. (Aside from getting money from Sun and MS, both of which are legitimate, as Sun and MS both actually license code that Novell owns.)

      In any case, it's far more likely to be the FBI that goes after SCO when that section starts, since SCO has been meticulous about everything that the SEC cares about.
  • Speak softly.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JohnLi ( 85427 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:55PM (#7791128) Homepage
    Does anyone else here think that it may not be the best idea to publicly (on Slashdot and Groklaw at least) counter claims made against something that seems bound for court? Doesn't this just give your opponent a head start on how to properly accuse you to get their desired results? I am not looking for security through obscurity, but given the veracity of the claimants, wouldn't some caution be in order?

    Mark.
    • Fallacies (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:21PM (#7791310) Homepage
      1. The damage done to Linux will not come from any court ruling even if unfavorably, so it needs to be countered on the battle field of public opinion.

      2. The court case is against IBM and notably on some contractual issues. Again public opinion equates the two but this is wrong. IBM could lose and Linux could be unharmed in theory.

      3. Groklaw and to a lesser degree Slashdot is part of an experiment. OpenSource lawsuit. The methodology of OpenSource is being used against SCO.

      The debunking of anything SCO claims in hours after they make it public or file it in court is something that is new and will be lethal to SCO in the end.

    • by shis-ka-bob ( 595298 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:37PM (#7791400)
      I've wondered about this, but I don't think this is much of an issue. Its not like your average slashdotter is more competent than IBM lawyers or IBM's experts on Unix internals. It may well be that IBM can find a few useful gems on Groklaw or Slashdot, but that could actually be useful.

      I don't think that David Boise will be spending too much time searching Slashdot to prepare to counter claims in posts that begin IANAL. Perhaps Groklaw is more useful, but I still think that Boise and coworkers will spend thier valuable hours with experts from industry and acadamia. I think that the S/N ratio on Slashdot is just to low to be useful. We can have a lot of fun on Slashdot, and we can learn quite a bit on Groklaw. I say we go on learning and having fun. The lawyers will go on nicely without us.

  • by bbdd ( 733681 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @07:57PM (#7791141)
    we should all take a deep breath, sit back, and have a sco juice [scojuice.com]
  • Linus is lying (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:06PM (#7791209)
    Okay, maybe he's not lying, but he ought to check his own code. errno.h was taken from Minix, according to his comments

    /*

    * ok, as I hadn't got any other source of information about

    * possible error numbers, I was forced to use the same numbers

    * as minix.

    * Hopefully these are posix or something. I wouldn't know (and posix

    * isn't telling me - they want $$$ for their f***ing standard).

    *

    * We don't use the _SIGN cludge of minix, so kernel returns must

    * see to the sign by themselves.

    *

    * NOTE! Remember to change strerror() if you change this file!

    */


    Now, Minix was also a homegrown Unix and written completely apart from the AT&T source, so if Linus copied Minix, that's fine.

    You can read all 3 or 4 sentences of the Minix license, but I think it's summed up pretty well with: For all practical purposes, MINIX can be treated as if it were in the public domain..

    And I haven't even looked at the other files yet.
    • Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ebcdic ( 39948 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:16PM (#7791279)
      Using the same numbers isn't copying the file.
    • Re:Linus is lying (Score:5, Informative)

      by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @09:07PM (#7791595) Homepage Journal
      Well, I just posted a comment about this here [slashdot.org], but I've been digging a little more. (Oh, and BTW, he said he used the same numbers, not that he took a copy of the file from Minix. Not that it would make any difference whatsoever, as every line is like '#define EBADF 9')

      From Linux 0.01 to Linux 1.0, errno.h got from 60 lines to 132, and the comment at the top of the file was removed. Also, each error number got a comment. Apart from that, they are mostly the same, listed from 1 to 39 (the last one in 0.0.1, 1.0 goes to 122, and has numbers 512-514 as well). In 2.6.0, the file has split into errno-base.h and errno.h, in include/asm-generic/, and errno-base.h is virtually identical to errno.h in 1.0 from 1 to 34 (the word 'arg' has been expanded to 'argument', and errno.h takes over from errno-generic.h in 2.6.0). In errno.h in 2.6.0, EDEADLOCK has been redefined from the number 58 to the letters EDEADLK, there are two new numbers, and 512-514 have been removed. That's from 1.0 to 2.6.0, virtually unchanged after almost 10 years in developement, and with a very clear resemblance to a file last modified 1991-09-17, that openly states that most of this is taken from Minix. Even my /. posts change more from 'Preview' to 'Submit'. (Yes, even this one, but I changed it back, and added this sentence.)

      SCO's claims are getting extremely strange lately. Yes, removing these files, if they were infringing on SCO's copyright, would be quite difficult. You can't live without error messages, can you? But proving the genealogy of these files is just so trivially easy, that SCO hardly can have checked at all. Other files they've mentioned, like include/linux/a.out.h, are also very much the same from 1.0 to 2.4.20 and 2.6.0 (there are some more changes in that file, so I'm not listing them. There are more similarities than differences, however.) I've looked a bit at include/linux/stat.h as well, and 2.6.0 still has plenty of stuff that was there already in Linux 1.0. Most of the files SCO has listed are old, and they are very much Linux.
  • by the_mad_poster ( 640772 ) <shattoc@adelphia.com> on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:09PM (#7791234) Homepage Journal

    I feel like I'm watching some sort of play by play here. As Linus enumerates the various header files, I'm poppin' 'em into vim or emacs (or pico.. whatever mood strikes) and walking through them.

    Shit... a few more weeks of these ridiculous SCO claims and maybe I'll know enough about the kernel to become a Linux hacker. Laugh if you will, but I didn't know anymore about C than the data types and basic syntax before this crap started. I've learned all sorts of neat stuff since then!

    Thanks SCO! You've taught me in 9 months what I wouldn't let 4 years of college education beat into my thick skull!

  • Darl McPuke (Score:5, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:27PM (#7791337)
    In other news, SCO sues Coca Cola for infringing SCO's copyrights and patents by copying SCO's formula for the soft drink. SCO invented the formula in 1906. According to SCO CEO Darl McBride, Coca Cola contains over 1 million ingredients invented by SCO.

    In more other news, SCO sues the Catholic Church for infringing SCO's copyrights and patents through unlawful reproduction and distribution of the Holy Bible. According to SCO CEO Darl McBride, the Bible contains over 1 million verses copied illegally from SCO intellectual property.

    In yet more other news... oh I give up.

  • Diff it! (Score:5, Informative)

    by utlemming ( 654269 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:41PM (#7791428) Homepage
    Linus commented that he himself remembers writing those files. Well, thanks to Kernel.org [kernel.org] and a little too much time on my hands, I did a little exploring. Kernel 2.6.0 has errno.h in two files. To make my life a little easier, I combined the two files, errno.h and errno-base.h. In Kernel 2.3.50 it is one file.

    Well, as we know, SCO is claiming that 2.4.21 is the kernel that started with the problems. If that is the case, assuming that SCO actually has a case then we have a problem.

    But the thing is that the errno.h and errno-base.h in 2.6.0 and the errno.h in 2.3.50 have only one difference other than being split up and the appropriate location indicators. The only difference is:

    #define E2BIG 7 /*Argument list too long*/ -- 2.6.0
    #define E2BIG 7 /*Arg list too long*/ -- 2.3.50

    I obtained this by using diff. So a simple utility disproves SCO's claim on that ground. Also, you will notice that the Kernel v. 0.01 has only 39 error numbers. They are also included, with the same error numbers in the current 2.3.50 and the 2.6.0 files. A cursory look revealed that 2.4.23 has the same errno.h err codes.

    So when Linus says that he wrote them there is proof. Further, since 2.4.21 is the infected one, what is the difference between 2.3.50 and 2.4.23 and the comments. Surely SCO can not be so stupid as to say that comments are a cause for action -- the end user does not even see nor are they accessable to the end user unless they have the source.

  • by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:53PM (#7791517)
    Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"? If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is? If I were the judge in this case, I'd be telling them to make their case or withdraw it. But, as Dennis Miller say, that's just me, I could be wrong.
    • by Platinum Dragon ( 34829 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @10:10PM (#7791872) Journal
      Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"?

      Well, a pretrial judge pretty much did. SCO has to cough up their evidence, "with specificity", by January fifth. It's not exactly the next morning, but from what I gather, thirty days might as well be the next morning in the legal world. After this month of bullshit, I don't think they will get off easy come the fifth of January.

      If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is? ...and that's kind of what IBM, the judge, and 99.99% of Slashdot, Groklaw, and Yahoo! SCOX forum posters have been getting at. Heck, maybe Kevin McBride will pull a rabbit out of his hat.

      And maybe I'll pull the next version of Windows out of my ass.

      Either way, in two weeks, this case is finally going somewhere, either to trial, or into the dustbin of history. Of course, this does nothing to stop IBM's countersuit, or Red Hat's lawsuit, and if Novell weighs in, well, Darl might want to actually use those lawyers he just spent $9 million on last quarter.
  • Through all this madness everyone thinks that SCO is against Linux. In reality this is the boost that Linux needed to get it's name out there to really start to get big. Maybe Darl gave up on his UNIX and decided to give Linux a hand up.....

    Well, I can dream can't I?
  • Legal Tactic? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eigenvalue ( 690985 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @10:09PM (#7791867)
    IANAL: Eventhough I don't think SCO has a case, I don't like articles like the one above. Didn't the courts recently uphold an IBM motion that forces SCO to reveal some of the code infrigements it claims? I would think a common legal tactic would be to give an impression of satisfying the court while sending out the least useful information at the worst possible time and in a voluminous quantity that actually says very little. 65 files containing lots of redundancy sent out three days before Christmas could be seen as a delaying tactic. I sure hope this is not what SCO will reiterate to the court in answer to the IBM discovery, because they will have bought themselves time for another round of antics. "But your honor, we gave them thousands of line of code in 65 five files, and yet they are still not satisfied?" For various reasons, I would think SCO would like to reveal the stronger evidence of their argument at the latest stage possible. For one, if someone comes forward to defend open source while chosing undisclosed evidence as an example then SCO could pose the question as to why the defender knew that was a sore point. That is why I still don't understand the seemingly benign actions like the public retraction of some code by SGI or the immediate "feel good" response given to SCO's last offensive. The former can be construed as an admission of some sort while the latter places Linus as the original owner of disputed files. So even if someone else patched in something at a later stage, SCO may have an argument to drag Linus further in: the owner of the file and project should monitor more carefully the progression of the work. In fact this may be similar to something argued in the past. The Linus response makes you feel good with its mockery, but I do not think it a smart response. Let SCO have the burden of establishing everything. As the accuser, let them do all the work. Even if some of the information is public domain, it'll take them longer than if someone spells it out and they may not have time to cover more ground to finesse their weak arguments. Linux does not need to win a PR war, it needs to establish its case in court. Very few people outside of Linux fans will read this article, therefore making such as response of little PR value to start with.
  • by An Anonymous Hero ( 443895 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @10:20PM (#7791921)

    Looks like they won't fool everyone this time:

    Creator of Linux Defends Its Originality [nytimes.com]

    also:

    Novell Registers Unix Copyrights [nytimes.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22, 2003 @11:08PM (#7792127)

    Note: This is a repost of a comment that I sent to groklaw.

    I do have a copy of the Unix source, circa 1988, and I can't see how anyone who knew any C could possibly think that the ctype implementation is copied.

    The array has a similar name (_ctype in Linux, a variation on that in Unix). Some of the C macros used to perform each test (see the definition of _U, _L etc in include/linux/ctype.h) have the same names as they do in Unix. Some do not. For example, isdigit() uses _D (for digit) in Linux and but Unix uses a different capital letter. Similarly, _SP in the Linux version has a single-capital-letter name in Unix.

    Notably, the order that the macros are defined (and hence their specific bit values) are different.

    The implementations are also interestingly different. The specific isxxx() macros, for example, are written in a different way in Linux and in Unix. Unix doesn't use an __ismask()-like macro, preferring to access the array directly.

    As Linus pointed out, there are only so many ways to write an ISO-compliant ctype implementation in C. I can see how anyone who didn't know this might think that the Linux code could be copied, but nobody who knew any C could possibly make this mistake.

    The most telling difference for me is that the Unix ctype handles EOF, like the ANSI/ISO standard says it should, but the Linux version does not. Why someone would copy the Unix code AND go to the trouble of introducing an incompatibility with the ANSI/ISO standard is one for the lawyers to sort out.

  • by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @11:32PM (#7792231)
    SCO keeps talking about the "ABI". It appears that they are not claiming copyright on the headers themselves, but on the general kind of interface those headers specify. Whether Linus looked at BSD or SysV headers is then immaterial.

    It's not clear that something that general is copyrightable--they seem to be fishing. But keep in mind that movie plots have been defended using copyright law, so it's possible.
    • by civilizedINTENSITY ( 45686 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @01:28AM (#7792710)
      check it out [slashdot.org]
      Subj: AT&T donated rights
      By: radicimo Date: 12/22/03 10:21 pm

      from Groklaw thread on Linus' code
      (h++p://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031222 174158852#c41366)
      --
      Standards
      Authored by: meissner on Monday, December 22 2003
      @ 09:10 PM EST
      I was a member of the ANSI X3J11 C standards committee from its founding in 1983 until after the first ANSI and later ISO standards were released in 1989 and 1990 respecitively. As part of the process, AT&T through its official representive (Lawrence Rosler) specificially gave the rights to the C language and its library (including the ctype.h, signal.h, and errno.h header files) to the committe. I believe they did the same thing officially to the POSIX committee at the same time (which would cover ioctl.h and more of the errnos in errno.h, and more of the signals in signal.h). Unfortunately, I no longer retain paper documents from that period, but if it becomes important to establish a clear paper trail, I suspect Jim Brody (chair), Tom Plum (Vice char), and P. J. Plauger (secretary) probably do retain their copies.
      Of course, as has been shown in the past, SCO really has no institutional memory of the past.
  • by TrentC ( 11023 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @12:30AM (#7792475) Homepage
    I can't believe what I just read on Groklaw [groklaw.net]; Darl McBride claims to have a "linux expert" that can assert that Linus did not, in fact, write those header files [nytimes.com]!
    But Mr. Torvalds is also clearly angered by SCO's accusation that much of Linux was merely copied. "In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any Unix code, ever.


    "I can show, and SCO should have been able to see, that the list they show clearly shows original work, not copied."

    [Emphasis mine] Darl C. McBride, the chief executive of SCO, said he stood by the company's assertions. He said that a Linux expert who will testify in the SCO suit against I.B.M., which was filed last March, went over the code closely. "As a social revolutionary, Linus Torvalds is a genius," Mr. McBride said. "But at the speed the Linux project has gone forward something gets lost along the way in terms of care with intellectual property."


    So Darl McBride claims to have a Linux expert that can rebut the assertion that Linus has hard evidence that the disputed files were written by him in the form of those actual files, archived in a Linux tarball that is mirrored the world over.

    Well, all I can say is, if SCO can do that, then they deserve to win this case; we can all celebrate their victory by building snowforts in Hell.

    Jay (=
  • by Brown Line ( 542536 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @04:41AM (#7793233)
    More than 20 years ago, AT&T sued Mark Williams Co., the publisher of the Coherent operating system (a commercial clone of UNIX) for copyright infringement. The suit was dropped when MWC showed (and Dennis Ritchie himself verified) that although Coherent replicated the functionality of UNIX as described in the System 7 documentation, it had an independent code base. This was proved both by examination of the source code, and by the fact that the Coherent kernel did not replicate several undocumented UNIX bugs (and, of course, had a number of bugs of its own that UNIX did not have).

    The Coherent episode suggests one approach to disproving the SCO case: if undocumented SCO/UNIX bugs (or features) are missing from Linux, that strongly suggests that the Linux code was not copied from UNIX. Documenting subtle differences in behavior between the two kernels could put the final nail into SCO's coffin.

    If SCO thinks that it somehow has a copyright on the intellectual content of the code (e.g., that only it can publish a macro called "isdigit()"), well, AT&T long ago chose not to assert that claim.

"...a most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!" -- _Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure_

Working...