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."
Long live geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
UNICS was released nearly 40 years ago...and it's legacy still lives on. It'll take more than the likes of SCO (and a dotted green line) to tear down the Open-Source community. Long live geeks.
Re:Long live geeks (Score:4, Funny)
(Disk Operating System not
(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)
Re:Long live geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Long live FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
THerefore I think they realise that to go after *BSD is to kill the goose that's laid them plenty of golden eggs.
Re:Long live FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
I would also speculate the Microsoft wouldn't have too much of a problem with the LGPL as well, since that only involves contributing back changes to the LGPLed code.
Re:Long live geeks (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's more like 34. (Score:2)
According to Grokline [grokline.net], "UNICS" was released Dec. 31, 1969. I guess that could be "nearly 40," but it's not quite.
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).
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:simple... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:simple... (Score:2, Insightful)
Boy, would that be funny... (Score:2)
(I think that Levenez's work is quite good. I just always assume that a chart or graph is a simplified representation and never to be taken literally)
Re:Boy, would that be funny... (Score:2)
Re:simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright law governs hows you attribute things, and what mayu legally be derived. So, you can't take a table of somebody else's data and pass it off as your own. However, you can take the table, perform your own analysis, and attibute it to yourself.
An obvious example from the real world would be the AMI bios; it was "derived", "inspired", or even "based on" the IBM bios - yet a judge said it was OK.
The same is clearly true here; SCO will have no luck arguing that
maybe not so simple... (Score:2, Interesting)
If anything, this shows that SCO is not going away merely because they don't have a case. The will keep grinding away as long as they have funding.
Re:maybe not so simple... (Score:2)
I think they ran out of offensives quite a while ago and are focusing on trying to cull the damage as much as they can.
But, of course, it's far, far too late. MWAH HA HA HA HA HA!!!
Re:maybe not so simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:to the best of my knowledge- (Score:3, Informative)
Malicious prosecution? [law.com]
Re:simple... (Score:5, Funny)
It doen't matter. (Score:4, Insightful)
Arrg!
-Daniel
Re:It does matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't release what they don't own. Since it appears that Novell owns the copyrights, SCO may be elligible for a lawsuit for unlawful disclosure of copyrighted material to the public. This is yet another can of worms, and we would have to hope that since Novell just bought SuSe (with the help of IBM) that this would not cause other problems with code SCO contributed before it became evil.
Re:It doen't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It doen't matter. (Score:2)
To my knowledge, a software license is a contractual agreement. Can I join into two conflicting contractual agreements, and then later pick which one to ge oblicated to?
Re:It doen't matter. (Score:5, Funny)
The GPL is not a contractual agreement. It says so itself, right in the first paragraph or so.
Can I join into two conflicting contractual agreements, and then later pick which one to ge oblicated to?
No, but you can decide who you'd rather be sued by.
Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, they certainly were aware of the violation at the time they filed their lawsuit against IBM. And they knowingly and consciously continued to distribute Linux as a product for some time, and from their website for at least eight months, after this. Any protections they might have potentially had they simply threw away by doing this.
Re:It doen't matter. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a software company that created a Linux distribution for them to say they did not know what was in it is for them to admit that they were not doing there job as a distribution.
The reason to by a distribution like RH, Caldera, or Lindows is to have someone bring the product together and make sure it works. As well as provide support and other services.
It would be one thing if it was a distribution by an non-software company, or by a private group or individual. Then maybe I could imagen that they did not know what they were selling, but Caldera's pitch was buy our product because we know what we are doing.
Re:It doen't matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
So they can choose between A) losing because they GPL'd everything in dispute regardless of whether it was proprietary or not before they distributed it, or B) losing because their entire linux business was based on willful, for-profit piracy.
wrongo. (Score:2)
And also, you can distribute GPL'd code without GPLing it, it's just a violation of copyright law. If the author finds out, you'll have to stop, or be fined by the
Re:wrongo. (Score:2)
I think this is valid in other types of agreements but not here. Consider that SCO had the code right in their view all along; is it not their responsibility to ensure all the code is OK? I'm
> But the author can't claim that all your code is now GPL'd.
That's debateable -m
Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:2)
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:2)
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:2)
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:4, Funny)
Do you think he succeeded?
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:2)
Not exactly. Minix was pretty much the only option other than BSD at the time, and BSD required some beefy hardware. The problem was that Tanenbaum didn't want to add the features necessary to make Minix a useful OS. He wanted it to be a teaching tool. The result was that Linus used Minix to bootstrap Linux development to fill the vacuum.
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:2)
You forget that Minix wasn't free either. BSD was an option, it was just a piss poor one.
Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, you need to go MUCH farther back in time. When Linux came out, you needed a MINIMUM of a 286 AT machine to run BSD. Minix ran on an 8086. Linux attempted to copy the small footprint of Minix instead of the large footprint of BSD.
The reason for BSD's poor performance was tha
Re: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: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:Can Linux kernel be a derived from a microkerne (Score:2)
Doesn't the whole microkernel versus (hugely) monolithic kernel make this whole discussion a moot point?
Well...not if there were actually code that went from SCO-owned IP that hasn't been declared public-domain or licensed publicly, into minix, and from there to Linux. If that actually happened, this wouldn't be moot.
Of course, Tanenbaum and Torvalds both assert that neither of those exchanges happened, and I don't see a lot of (read: any) evidence to suggest that they did.
So, no, this doesn't make it
Not plausible (Score:5, Interesting)
No, because the guy who made this link, Ken Brown, intentionally ignored multiple sources of information that Linux was *not* derived from Linux. It was totally untrue, and he knew it because:
-
Tanenbaum, who wrote Minix, told him so.
-
The guy Ken Brown hired to find where Linux took from Minix told him that it had not in fact happened, after analysing the code.
There never was *any* plausible support for Brown's case and he knew it *befire* making PR announcements, but he went ahead anyhow.Re:Not plausible (Score:4, Funny)
That would have made writing it a lot easier, I'm sure...
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.Re:You missed a few! (Score:4, Funny)
All of those people are hybrid source hackers.
It took thousands of programmers years to create Unix. It seems obvious to me that there is no possible way an inexperienced lone programmer could create millions of lines of the Linux system in 6 months in his parents basement. All of the people you listed are obviously biased and lying.
[/Brown immitation]
-
Re:You missed a few! (Score:2)
However, if I read the grandparent post correctly, the point was that Tanenbaum and the hired gun (too lazy to look up his name. Sorry, sir.) both said there was nothing substantial shared between Minix and Linux. And they said so before the Ken Brown/AdTI PR machine ramped up.
While you are correct that a number of individuals-in-the-know did try to make the information known, the grandparent post stands correct as far as the timeline is concerned.
-transiit
Re:Not plausible (Score:2)
--
Evan "Ran a BBS based on Minix for awhile"
Re:Not plausible (Score:3, Informative)
You missed the point ... (Score:2)
The other theory on Ken Brown's motivation (that this "research" was done at Microsoft's behest) makes no sense to me. Microsoft would not want to be seen as associated with anything as obviously bogus as Samizdat. They are not th
Even though they called it "unhelpful"... (Score:5, Interesting)
I said "Yes", of course, since I'd use Linux on principle if I hadn't been already when extortionists like TSG (The Sco Group) sued them. If they turn and sue someone like the NetBSD project, I'd find a place in my organisation for a NetBSD box as well.
For the curious, IDC called from Malaysia into Australia, and "Brian" (no idea if that's his real name) said that IDC were planning on setting up their main Asia-Pacific offices there.
The Diagram Is Not Measuring Source Dependancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Emphasis is not mine.
Thus is, an arrow does not imply that Linux's source code is derived from Minix. It only implies that, in some way, the functionality may be compatible with Minix. Source code is not the only criteria for an arrow.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Diagram Is Not Measuring Source Dependancy (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wayback Machine [archive.org] indicates [archive.org] that "Note 1" was added in the period 2nd August 2002 [archive.org] to 14th October 2002 [archive.org].
This is well before the start of the SCO affair (7th March 2003), so the note is not a belated attempt to bolster Linux's case. The diagram genuinely does not measure source code dependence.
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 th
Now, since Ken Brown... (Score:3, Funny)
Linux cames from North Pole and this is it...
Ha!
"If we had some ham, we could have ham 'n' eggs... (Score:5, Funny)
It's just like that old joke. If Linux came from Minix, and if Minix came from Unix, then SCO might have some eggs. But since Linux didn't come from Minix and Minix didn't come from Unix, SCO has shit.
Re:"If we had some ham, we could have ham 'n' eggs (Score:2)
Levenez's Chart (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, Eric states very clearly on his site that "an arrow indicates an inheritance like a compatibility, it is not only a matter of source code"
And anyway, Minix doesn't contain any AT&T source code by Tanenbaum's own admission. Linux doesn't contain Minix code. These are both original works, influenced by the Unix flavor of their time. That is what the Levenez chart shows, nothing more.
The chart is only useful to SCO in their campaign of dishonesty to suggest something that is clearly untrue, and that has been proved repeatedly to be untrue.
Re:Levenez's Chart (Score:2)
Minux had no unix code (Score:5, Insightful)
I read in the Linux journal a few years ago that Minux was formed because AT&T wanted to charge $30,000 per cpu for sysV!
Talk about extortion!
Minux was formed as a result but was never updated when Bell labs lowered the price and allowed other people to make versions of Unix like Sun and SGI.
Unless I am wrong?
Minix became outdated after Unix went down in price and instead became used in the academia environment to teach students how an OS works. It never really was finished and the internet really did not exist like today without a WWW. Mainly just a few newsgroup and a tiny number of FTP sites which made working on Minix difficult.
BSD on the other hand has plenty of more merit.
It is a direction descendant of SysIII with some bits of SysV unixware code added in.
All the offending code has been removed today but FreeBSD 1.x and early builds of NetBSD had the Unix in it. THis is why FreeBSD compatiblity only goes back to 2.x and not the 1.x series based on NET/2.
They are a descendant of SysIII from the late 70's since this was used for early BSD development.
Since the deal was sealed we dont really know what happened or what the terms were with the current BSD's. IBM wants to find out.
Someone please feel free to correct me if I am wrong since I may be ingorant in this subject area. I want to know.
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:3, Informative)
Re:Minux had no unix code (Score:2)
It is a direction descendant of SysIII with some bits of SysV unixware code added in.
Actually, BSD started from V7 Unix. System III came later. This is one of the reasons that signal handling semantics are such a mess.
Remember it's pump and dump (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Remember it's pump and dump (Score:2)
Re:Remember it's pump and dump (Score:3, Funny)
Well, for starters you'd pay like $5 a roll . .
It's a good idea, but it's not that good.
Doesn't the original... (Score:2)
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 to LINIX to LSD (Score:2, Funny)
wish I had a link.
Re:MINIX to LINIX to LSD (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MINIX to LINIX to LSD (Score:2)
Don't wish, google... http://www.missblackwidow.com/drugs.html
The real question is (Score:3, Funny)
Reply below
Perhaps. (Score:3, Interesting)
A modern web browser
Re:The real question is (Score:2)
The guy writes control systems for rockets part time while working on Doom 3. I'd say he's fairly talented.
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:Was This Not Obvious? (Score:2)
Re:Was This Not Obvious? (Score:3, Funny)
It is not like the Linux kernel was doing 3D graphics back then.
...or now, so much...
We need the source (Score:3, Interesting)
(*) or we could just ask him.
I doubt it. (Score:2, Funny)
Everything about SCO's suit, and Microsoft's supplimentary PR, is a smokescreen. Trying to find logic or reason in this smokescreen is no different in any way than pointing at clouds and going "hey, that one looks like a bird".
anything prior to 1991 (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it really depends on what you call a Unix timeline, and what you call SCO intellectual property. Of course it wasn't their intellectual property at the time, but it is now since they changed the contracts on everyone. IBM didn't think that they could change the contracts, and see what happened.
They sued Daimler Chrysler for not giving them the serial numbers of processors that used to run UNICOS 1.0 or something similar (UNICOS 1.0 apparently always shipped with source)- for Cray supercomputers that vary in processing power from approximately 0.25 gigaflops to 1 gigaflop. No one keeps museum pieces that old around, there is no point in doing so, especially when the point of having those computers in the first place was for their supercomputing abilities.
It's not a Unix timeline if they use it like that; they are basically saying that "Linux" has its "roots" in stuff prior to 1991, but that "SCO Linux", whatever that is supposed to mean, is anything from 1991 forward.
The whole point is this: whatever it is that SCO are doing, they are doing things that will more than likely fail. Expecting an organization to keep records of a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the mid-eighties that has approximately 1/60th the floating-point processing power of a single-processor G5 at 2.0 Ghz and the equivalent of 64 megs of ram is a little bit on the funny side, I seriously doubt that any organization would have the floor space to keep a computer like that around just for the sake of licensing purposes. How many of us wrote legal documents to Microsoft cancelling our EULAs when we stopped using Windows 3.0, or say, for instance, how many universities wrote documents to Sun Microsystems every time they retired an IPX or a Sparcstation 1+ or perhaps something even older than that? It's just so you can say "We are suing this prominent company for something that, when you look more closely at it, is never going to fly, but we realize that most people won't look at it that closely or understand it that thoroughly, so it will, in the end, have the desired effect.
Anything prior to approximately 1991 is not Linux, so again, it's not relevant.
It does explain what \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}, is though, - \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\} would be Linux (post-1991).
Anything prior to that is not Linux, so it's not \\\\{_hybrid-source_\\\\}.
SCO is basically saying that because they distributed Linux at some point under the GPL, and because the GPL is not valid in their opinion, that because they contributed to it, and because they hold some sort of UNIX rights, that they own Linux. That's really what they are saying, it has nothing to do with Minix, that's just a coincidence.
Of course, they won't get away with it. They know that, the lawyers know that, we know that. The real question is WHY are they doing it? That's the question. The answer to that question is known by those who need to know.
Re:anything prior to 1991 (Score:3, Interesting)
Before SCO, I (and my company) used open source because of a warm fuzzy 'freedom' feeling. Today that support has hardened (and is still hardening) into a business *requirement*.
The GPL is a known quantity to me. All I have to do is agree to its straightforward terms and all my licensing worries are over.
Contrast that with SCO's EULA shenanigans. If I was with SCO, I would have to be watching my back against t
Minux Linux SCO (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Minux Linux SCO (Score:2)
"cleanroom" (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? The problem is that Linux might be considered to be derived from a reverse-engineering of Minix, and that the reverse-engineering wasn't done "cleanroom" style.
Just as an example: When companies like NEC and AMD started producing x86-compatible processors, they went through a procedure designed to isolate them from being accused of copying Intel's work. Two teams were formed: One team's job was
Re:"cleanroom" (Score:3, Interesting)
not necessary to win the legal case(s) (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole thing is being "reverse-engineered". The "desired outcome" is a lawsuit, so whatever it takes to produce one is what
Re:"cleanroom" (Score:4, Interesting)
The workings of MINIX are discussed in the book in detail, and the complete source code and binaries are on a CD which comes with the book. The book was the standard cheap way to get MINIX, so it's pretty damn likely that Linus had a copy.
I was running Minix on my Atari and hacking the kernel source to support Cyrillic at around the time Linus started writing Linux, which was originally a replacement kernel for Minix. Linus did it because Andy Tanenbaum wouldn't add 386-only functionality to Minix, because he wanted it to be portable to whatever machines students had available to them--e.g. my Atari. Linus wanted protected virtual memory, so he started hacking on 386 assembler using his Minix system to do so.
All of this is pretty common knowledge, I thought, so I'm perplexed that so many people posting to this discussion seem unaware of it.
Re:"cleanroom" (Score:2, Interesting)
Ow. That timeline... (Score:3, Funny)
why the minix link? (Score:4, Insightful)
SCO, Baystar, RBC, Microsoft, EV1, Laura Dildo - all of them have been paid, hired, pimped or coherced into making some kind of statement to obfuscate the SCO plight as a whole for the past year and a whatever. The latest round with Ken brown and his alleged minix issues are just more of the same "Paid Advertising" bullshit that SCO and their Redmond investor buddies have been purchasing to try and confuse everyone.
The tree (Score:4, Insightful)
derives from what, in terms of code. Unix has clearly inspired
Minix, as Tanenbaum has said many times, so one might draw links.
There is no code sharing though.
Linus wrote Linux on Minix, and because he wanted a free Minix,
first versions were to some degree inspired by minix. So again
a link can certanly be drawn. No code sharing even here, as stated by
Tanenbaum and Linus though.
It's Minix! Repeat after me ... (Score:3, Informative)
Damn it, you guys, it's Minix!! Not Minux, not Munix ... Minix!
zdefintely not from same source (Score:3, Informative)
Re:at least now there may be a plausible reason... (Score:2)
Re:at least now there may be a plausible reason... (Score:2)