What is the point? [LWN.net]

What is the point?

Posted Aug 23, 2003 10:18 UTC (Sat) by chel (guest, #11544)
Parent article: Maybe SCO had a point

Regarding the malloc function, the algorithm is old. A formal description of the algorith is in Knuths "The art of computer programming" published in 1968. I think ALGOL68 was (one of) the first language with a formal description of this kind of dynamic memory usage.
A published and free version of this implementation exists.
An identical implementation of this algorithm exists in de Unix SYSVR4 source with a copyright notice. Analysis of whitespace and comment formatting shows resemblence between this source and a piece of sourcecode that was/is in the Linux source tree.
This source was contributed by SGI with both a SGI copyright and a GNU copyright notice.

Putting a copyright notice above freely available content does not make it copyrigthed, if so there are many violations, just compare http://docsrv.caldera.com/cgi-bin/man/man?clear+1 with current Linux manpages. The SCO manpage is almost identical, but caries a copyright notice. Claiming IP on whitespace distribution in sourcecode is as stupid as creating a new original work by modifyig the whitespace distribution in existing sourcecode.

If I consider the current cases: SCO vs IBM, RedHat vs SCO, IBM vs SCO, I don't see anything where this whitespace distrubution could be of any importance.

SCO vs IBM: IBM was not involved.
IBM vs SCO: is about patents
RedHat vs SCO: RedHat distributed code with a perfect GNU copyright notice from copyrightholder SGI, a well known manufacturer with good reputation.

Some good programming practices are:
- normal nummerical calculus does not apply on pointer types, so pointers and integers should not be mixed.
- the size of basic C types are implementation dependent.
Already the first line: "unsigned long malloc(mp, size)" is in violation with these basic rules. If this piece of code would appear in court, the only reason could be to demonstrate how, though the lack of peer reviews, wrong code can survive for 30 years in some well known operating systems. Claiming IP rights on this code would be a clear demonstration of lack of competence.

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