Creator of Linux defends its originality (News.com)

Posted Dec 23, 2003 19:47 UTC (Tue) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

Didn't I see this in that 80's movie "Back to School"? Where Thorton Mellon hires Kurt Vonnegut Jr to do a book report on one of his own books and his teacher gives the report an F because Mellon "obviously doesn't know anything about Kurt Vonnegut Jr"?

Hey, Darl, it'd be brilliant if Rodney Dangerfield hadn't done that schtick already over 20 years ago!!!

Posted Dec 24, 2003 14:28 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

It is not SCO claiming "Linux copied these headers" (that is ridiculous, and was shown to be false very fast by Linus himself), they are in essence claiming that the ABI (i.e., how you call kernel functions, and what they return, in this particular case the specific error codes) is their protected property, and can't be used at all without their permission. Which they also declare won't ever be given for use under GPL.

IANAL, but I personally think this is complete nonsense. Much of the ABI is the POSIX API, which (as a standard everybody should follow) just can't be restricted this way. Besides, there are several Unix work-alikes (OSF/1, Mach, Minix, probably others) that do need the particular API, and are in no way (or only tenouosly) related to Unix source code. Then there is the BSD mess, which would indicate that there is no copyrightable stuff in this (mostly previous to that lawsuit) code/API. And then there are the requirements for interoperability that can't be brushed aside so easily IMHO.

The big problem is that all this nonsense might very well drag on for many years, and it certainly could slow down Linux (just remember that if it hadn't been for the FUD surrounding the BSD suit, most probably nobody would remember Linux today...).

And before conspiracy theorists start pointing their fingers at the usual suspects, just consider that SCO was long predicted to be the first casualty of Linux. It sure was, the original SCO smelled the coffee and got rid of that particular millstone around their necks by dumping it on Caldera. Caldera did not want the Unix code, they were after the retail channel for use with their Linux offering (which was already doing quite badly due to unrelated stupid decisions). They got some rights over Unix source code as an add-on. When the idea of entrenched SCO resellers peddling a dying Linux distribution predictably went south, they got the brilliant idea of suing IBM where it hurts most... and IBM really had no way out but setting an example of them.

Looks more and more a case of the dictum "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"