The other important question

The other important question

Posted Jun 6, 2003 18:12 UTC (Fri) by brugolsky (✭ supporter ✭, #28)
In reply to: The other important question by rknop
Parent article: Notes from the SCO conference call

Exactly. The two may have common code descended from BSD or other sources, such as hardware vendors.

As I understand it, the settlement in the BSD case specifically precludes all successors in interest from re-litigating the BSD suite. That means that any code that is in 4.4BSD-lite *whether it originated at AT&T or UCB*, is exempt. So really, what does that leave, System V IPC, and perhaps a few userland utils? The same goes for concepts and methods -- if it is in 4.4BSD-lite, it ought to be exempt. The UNIX interface spec is owned, variously, by the federal government (FIPS), IEEE (POSIX), and The Open Group (Single Unix Spec).

Perhaps the kernel contains some code lifted from elsewhere, but I think it unlikely that much, if any, is in the core, for two reasons: (1) the group of developers making changes to the core is generally small and have a proven track record; (2) Linus exercises much tighter control over the core design and aesthetics. In all likelihood, the worst outcome is that some important driver or filesystem (think SCSI, IDE, RAID, or NFS) has illicit code. [I'm not implying that any of these are suspect -- far from it!]

My guess is that any offending code is minimal, and SCO won't release any details publicly because they expect it to be quickly rewritten, with vendors issuing updates within a few days.

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