Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw) [LWN.net]

Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 20, 2003 20:51 UTC (Thu) by stanmuffin (guest, #16955)
Parent article: Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw)

SCO searched for any reference in the Linux kernel source for SMP, JFS, RCU, and NUMA,

It bears noting that SCO searhed for the string literals "SMP", "JFS", "RCU", and "NUMA". What that's supposed to prove, I don't know. Certainly not that SCO has any copyright interest in said files.

Here's an example: /asm-arm/spinlock.h


#ifndef __ASM_SPINLOCK_H
#define __ASM_SPINLOCK_H

#error ARM architecture does not support SMP spin locks

#endif /* __ASM_SPINLOCK_H */

That's the whole file. Look at all them trade secrets! Har!

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Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 21, 2003 11:27 UTC (Fri) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

And of those 6 lines, 5 have no effect. 2 because they are empty, and 3 because the ifdef-magic to make sure the file is compiled only once doesn't actually matter in this case since the compilation blows up on the first attempt because of the #error directive anyways.

Thus the file in question reduces to:

#error ARM architecture does not support SMP spin locks

From which we can conclude that SCO seem to think it's "valuable IP" and a trade secret how to NOT do SMP on ARM. Hilarious.

Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 21, 2003 18:26 UTC (Fri) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link]

Here's an idea: insert comments everywhere into Linux 2.6.whatever with the words SMP, JFS, RCU, etc. (e.g. "this bit of code has nothing to do with RCU" or "this code works exactly the same in an SMP and non-SMP system"). Oops... you think i just broke the SCO intellectual property "detector" ?

Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 21, 2003 18:58 UTC (Fri) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link]

And of those 6 lines, 5 have no effect. 2 because they are empty...

Yeah, but where did Linux get the blanks line, eh? Proprietary Unix has blank lines. Obviously they were stolen from Unix.