Another SCO teleconference

Posted Jun 6, 2003 15:29 UTC (Fri) by erat (guest, #21)
In reply to: Another SCO teleconference by eru
Parent article: Another SCO teleconference

If such things are going to be tied to IBM, wouldn't it be more telling if the same code existed between Linux and AIX? IBM isn't the only source licensee, unless I'm mistaken. As pointed out somewhere else on this site, anything short of

// This is code stole from Unixware and placed in Linux
//
// Thanks,
//
// codestealer@ibm.com
int somefunction()
{
...
}

would be hard to tie to anyone definitively.

There is also the task of proving who did the stealing. For SCO to prove that the code is actually theirs, I'm guessing they'll need to prove that their code pre-dates the same code in Linux. The only kernel that I can think of that I can't find code for is 0.11 from back when I started using Linux. It wouldn't be too hard to do a recursive zgrep through the source tarballs to see when the code first appeared.

Of course, I'm assuming the alleged offending code is in the Linux kernel; everything else is owned/copyrighted by other folks like the FSF and have nothing to do with Linux when in source code form.