Maybe SCO had a point
Posted Aug 25, 2003 2:58 UTC (Mon) by
glennthigpen (guest, #14417)
In reply to:
Maybe SCO had a point by ken
Parent article:
Maybe SCO had a point
It is too early to go saying that the code was stolen. It is also too early to say that the code came from Sys V because of the asserts. The code was written by SGI and has their copyright notice. They evidently think they have the right to release it under the GPL.
The code itself is written along the lines of the 32V release, which has no copyright because AT&T failed to include the copyright notices as noted in the Judge's opinion in the USL vs. BSDI case.
The asserts themselves are there for debugging according to ESR. It would be just as good an assumption that the coder took the 32V code and modernized it for Linux SMP keeping the same structure as the 32V code.
The fact is, we do not know just how SGI derivd the code. And that is a problem between SGI and SCO. This one is not completely clear cut as I would like it to be and we cannot rule out any possible infringement at all. But it is something that would have been remedied very easily if SCO had shown it from the get-go and Linus felt that there was a problem there.
That was something that was said from the very beginning. "Show us the offending code, and if it indeed is infringing, it will be removed."
The Berkeley Packet Filter code is a completely different horse show, and there is little doubt in anyone's mind (except SCO) that Jay Schulist wrote that himself from published materials. However it seems that SCO claims that the BPF code in Sys V is theirs and it is in their codebase without the BSD copyright notice. Isn't there something about the "unclean hands" doctrine in IBM's response to SCO's lawsuit?
Glenn
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