An open letter to SCO [LWN.net]

An open letter to SCO

Posted Jun 12, 2003 9:23 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: An open letter to SCO by ImpTech
Parent article: An open letter to SCO

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

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An open letter to SCO

Posted Jun 12, 2003 12:47 UTC (Thu) by nosnilmot (subscriber, #746) [Link]

According to this JFS FAQ the JFS as we have it was a new implementation for OS/2, and the port for linux was made from a snapshot of the OS/2 implementation (From December 1999), and not from the version that made it into AIX 5L in May 2001.

It's not clear, however, whether the new implementation is completely new, or is derived from their original JFS1 that they had been included in AIX since 3.1. Either way, it's difficult to see how SCO can lay any claim to any of this - it all, apparently, being developed by IBM anyway.