An open letter to SCO

Posted Jun 12, 2003 9:23 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

Hope nobody's reading this looking for real insight.

I was -- and I got it!

This is the first time that SCO has publically stated which parts of the kernel contain infringing code. This is a major step forward: the kernel community can now start considering what they can do about it.

For example, the JFS code is fairly self-contained, it has several functional equivalents within the Linux kernel, and it isn't that popular a filesystem. It's also quite plausible that Unix UFS code did get into the AIX JFS implementation (it looks to AIX like a standard Unix filesystem, after all). This could have been taken into JFS for OS/2 and into the current Linux implementation, having been missed by IBM's code review and IP review teams.

It might now be considered justified to drop the JFS filesystem until such time as the status of the code becomes clearer. I shouldn't be surprised if Red Hat, at least, cleansed it out of their kernel branch...

Unfortunately, the SMP and NUMA stuff would be better described as "pervasive". But at least the community can start looking for candidates now: parts of the code that might have come from elsewhere.

James