The Opposite Is True [LWN.net]

The Opposite Is True

Posted May 22, 2003 1:53 UTC (Thu) by mbcook (subscriber, #5517)
Parent article: ...and if SCO is right...?

Let's just skay that this goes to court and the source code gets compaired. Maybe they're right. Maybe some code in the kernel was lifted. But how much code has been lifted out of the kernel (or other OSS projects) and put into SCO's codebase? I bet it's happened, and if it has it might be orders of magnitude more. What's to keep them from looking at the Linux driver for some network card and just copying it (and modifying it to work with their kernel)? I bet something like that has happened. It seems just as likely to me that if they do go to court, they'll be bitten by the reverse. The two seem just as likely to me.

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The Opposite Is True

Posted May 22, 2003 18:57 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

And, in practical fact, this has happened.

There is at least one case I remember where a hardware manufacturer
employee said (albeit off the record) that a driver wasn't being open
sourced because it either a) had stolen code in it, or b) had code in it
that violated someone else's patent. Video card, I think.

And there have certainly been a couple of cases where it's been
questionable as to whether a closed-source vendor had simply lifted GPL'd
code, and couldn't be caught at it since their code was closed.

So, certainly, they could have already been doing it to us...

But how do you prove it?

The Opposite Is True

Posted May 22, 2003 20:54 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

GPL clause 2c, while under strong contention as to its "freeness", is how lifted code is often found when proprietary software incorporates GPLd software. Running strings on the binary ends up pulling out the original author's copyright notices.

I imagine lots of proprietary software has similar strings (RCS id strings, for example).