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December 26th, 2003, 05:29 PM
#1
SCO, Torvalds and Novell
Was on Google news again, and ran into two articles. These are pretty interesting, and thought I would share with you guys. First, is Linus Torvalds defends his position that he wrote the files that are supposidly infringing on SCO's rights, and these quotes my friends are interesting.
http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5132484.html
...letters being sent out--urging companies to stop using Linux or to pay SCO license fees--listed for the first time more than 65 software files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code and contributed to Linux."
Torvalds began looking at these files and their history Monday.
So when he looks at them, he replies in an e-mail exchange
"Some of these files were written by me directly," Torvalds said in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux project by third parties, including IBM..." ...Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h," Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux"
and these header files, Torvalds goes on to say
"I wrote them," Torvalds noted, "and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed."
He observed that some of the macros, or programming shortcuts, 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 I took the liberty of looking for the files that are infringing, and good ol' Google comes to the rescue, and this is even more interesting. http://sco.tuxrocks.com/SCOFiles/ and the list of files are here http://sco.tuxrocks.com/Docs/IBM/Doc-63-A.pdf
It seems SCO is claiming owndership of SMP, JFS, RCU, and NUMA... problem is, will SCO compare source code with source code to show a jury the supposed sameness? I see this not happening espcially if Torvalds wrote this himself. As a juror, it will be very cut and dry to show even a non-programmer:
"Header file 1 looks like this, and Linus' header file looks like this..." and so forth with code side by side to show copying and pasting occured. Why do I get the feeling this is not going to happen?
Next, Novell has registered its copyright of UNIX: http://www.overclockersclub.com/news...rticle=7244016
What does this mean for SCO? More trouble. Personally, SCO is in a losing battle and is grabbing straws because it has failed as a company and are lying, backbiting sacks of **** because they themselves was a part of the open source movement and since they failed at that is now trying this. I do not see companies complying to the threats and demands for IP licenses when there was no proof or judgment to grant such actions by SCO so IMHO, it is just easier to throw the letters away and go oin with business.
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