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Still not a copyright infringementStill not a copyright infringementPosted Aug 22, 2003 5:38 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)In reply to: Still not a copyright infringement by rjamestaylor Parent article: Maybe SCO had a point More than one person we know has access to the System V code base. Some of them are known to us and trusted enough to give us no more than a list of file names and line numbers in the Linux kernel that might be questionable. That discloses none of the SCO art. And of course that is not a signal to just remove the code. We would first check the provenance of the code, and would often find that it was something used in System V but not owned by SCO, like the BPF code I reported on. Of course, you can even cross-check one friend against another, or ask one to verify what another has reported. Don't you think this is already going on, quietly? I would have expected that folks a number of companies would have been on this months ago. And by the way, if there was a significant infringement in a piece of code that people cared about - not in a prototype SGI driver for models that were never sold - someone would already have noticed. Thanks Bruce
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Still not a copyright infringement Posted Aug 22, 2003 13:33 UTC (Fri) by dwalters (guest, #4207) [Link] if there was a significant infringement in a piece of code that people cared about - not in a prototype SGI driver for models that were never sold - someone would already have noticed. This is a good point, and Linus has effectively said that the open source development model effectively allows this to happen. Don't you think this is already going on, quietly? That depends on just how many people actually do
I don't know what tools already exist to do this, but it strikes me that a useful tool for the community to develop would be a program to statistically analyse the two code bases and come up with suspicious matches. Of course it would be better for SCO to just make public what files, version and line numbers in Linux they think are infringing, but apart from a couple of examples, they don't appear to be doing that.
Still not a copyright infringement Posted Aug 22, 2003 14:54 UTC (Fri) by jmitchel (guest, #11611) [Link] Don't you think this is already going on, quietly?I believe this is more in a class of plausible deniability than it is a wishfull statement. Bruce's post sounds far more like a description of what is happening framed in a deniable way then it does a plan for action. For that matter, if I cared enough I could probably get access to some generation of SYSV source, having worked with some decently connected people at Bell Labs. Now I think of it, it would be tempting to try to find it. In the long run it would be far more edifying for me and dog+world to try matching Version 7 vintage code, to develop tools that others can use to do fast, efficient searches.
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