A look at the SCO complaint

Posted Mar 7, 2003 20:27 UTC (Fri) by cpeterso (guest, #305)
In reply to: A look at the SCO complaint by stevenj
Parent article: A look at the SCO complaint

it sounds like they are obliquely citing IBM's JFS and Omniprint (or any part of AIX that they open) as infringing code.

I thought that IBM's JFS port was taken from the OS/2 JFS, not the AIX JFS. So in that case, Linux JFS would be based on OS/2, not UNIX(TM). And is officially AIX consdiered UNIX(TM)?

Here is the answer from IBM's JFS FAQ: http://oss.software.ibm.com/developer/opensource/jfs/project/pub/faq.txt

Q1. What is the history of the source based use for the port of JFS for Linux.

A1. IBM introduced its UNIX file system as the Journaled File System (JFS) with the initial release of AIX Version 3.1. This file system, now called JFS1 on AIX, has been the premier file system for AIX over the last 10 years and has been installed in millions of customer's AIX systems. In 1995, work began to enhance the file system to be more scalable and to support machines that had more than one processor. Another goal was to have a more portable file system, capable of running on multiple operating systems.

Historically, the JFS1 file system is very closely tied to the memory manager of AIX. This design is typical of a closed-source operating system, or a file system supporting only one operating system.

The new Journaled File System, on which the Linux port was based, was first shipped in OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness in April, 1999, after several years of designing, coding, and testing. It also shipped with OS/2 Warp Client in October, 2000. In parallel to this effort, some of the JFS development team returned to the AIX Operating System Development Group in 1997 and started to move this new JFS source base to the AIX operating system. In May, 2001, a second journaled file system, Enhanced Journaled File System (JFS2), was made available for AIX 5L. In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.