Still not a copyright infringement [LWN.net]

Still not a copyright infringement

Posted Aug 22, 2003 13:33 UTC (Fri) by dwalters (guest, #4207)
In reply to: Still not a copyright infringement by BrucePerens
Parent article: Maybe SCO had a point

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

legally have access to the Sys V source code
have the time and motivation to perform detailed "pattern analys" between the two code bases

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.

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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.