SCO cancels IBM Unix license (News.com)

Posted Jun 17, 2003 3:06 UTC (Tue) by StevenCole (guest, #3068)
In reply to: SCO cancels IBM Unix license (News.com) by TheOneKEA
Parent article: SCO cancels IBM Unix license (News.com)

It's a popular misconception that everything that has gone into the kernel has an audit trail. True, many patches are cc'ed to linux-kernel, linux-mm, or lse-tech. But many patches just go directly to Linus.

For the past 14 months or so, Linus has used BitKeeper, and this shows the origin of the changesets fairly accurately, even for people who send traditional gnu patches.

Before that, the changelogs were a little sparse. For all the meanings of that word, see the README file in Linus' sparse checker.

So, it may be a challenge to determine with great certainty the source of the code in question, unless the original developer recognizes their own code and/or someone very familiar with that code steps forward and testifies to the code's origin in court.

To guard against the possibility that SCO has just taken some Linux code and pasted it into their code to show false identicality, I hope that IBM will insist on SCO making their code compile and link and then show that the resulting binary is the same as what they have previously distributed.

If SCO can't do that, then you know the saying about "....pants on fire".