Notes from the SCO conference call

Posted Jun 6, 2003 17:42 UTC (Fri) by pto (guest, #5753)
Parent article: Notes from the SCO conference call

One analyst says the source she saw included duplicated comments. That certainly implies some transfer one way or the other.

It should be easy to trace the ancestry of source code comments. If SCO wanted, they could pick just one of these comments (a couple of sentences would do), and ask everyone to look for them. There would soon be a table going back in time showing which versions had the comment. Then we'd know who was borrowing from whom.

But SCO must be terrified that any examples they pick will turn out show that UNIX borrowed from BSD or Linux, not the other way around. That's where the NDA helps them.

Also, since their goal is to destroy Linux, they want to say Linux is violating copyrights without giving the community a chance to fix it. Hiding the details behind the NDA lets them do that. They speak of only handfuls of lines of code that were copied. Those could be rewritten in days, and then you have a clean, court-approved Linux again. And SCO doesn't want that.