Code red for open source? (News.com) [LWN.net]

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 16:01 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137)
Parent article: Code red for open source? (News.com)

"We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

Having a court determine if code has been "obfuscated" is the stuff that nightmares are made of. If IBM loses this, the implications are huge. It seems to me that there's no way IBM can lose, but the little that I do know about the legal process in the US seems to suggest that rational thinking does not always prevail in court.

The last three words of the above quote -- "but it was" -- serve to underscore the arrogance of Darl McBride. There's no way that one can determine a person's intent by looking at a few lines of code, unless they have big chunks that have been copied in unaltered, which seems unlikely.

(Log in to post comments)

Code red for open source? (News.com)

Posted May 2, 2003 19:18 UTC (Fri) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link]

I'm sure that SCO will probably claim code like for (i=0; i<n; i++) especially given the other things they have claimed :-). Really they have to prove that their code was first - to implement algorithms and standards correctly there are only so many ways to do that. So they have to show that their code is not unique and has no prior art. But they also shoot themselves in the foot by distributing a very current Linux distro containing this very code after the suit was filed.