Posted on 05/30/2003 10:42:33 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
LOS ANGELES, May 30 (Reuters) - SCO Group Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOX), in a dispute with IBM and others over claims its intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system have been violated by competing software, on Friday said it will begin to open its code in a bid to show it has been improperly used.
On a conference call with reporters and analysts, Darl McBride, the president and chief executive of Lindon, Utah-based SCO, said the company was willing to give proof to the technology industry and others that code from Unix appears in the Linux operating system as well.
SCO has alleged that companies including International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) have abused its intellectual property rights by taking code from Unix and including it in the Linux derivative.
Linux is the major rival to Unix and Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows software. In recent years it has overtaken Unix in the marketplace, mostly because Linux distributors charge little or nothing for the core software and instead make their money on modifications, services and maintenance.
Microsoft licensed the rights to Unix from SCO in a deal earlier this month. Analysts have said controversy around Linux and intellectual property rights could benefit Linux competitors like Microsoft.
McBride said SCO would start showing the disputed pieces of software code to analysts and reporters under nondisclosure agreements next week.
"We hope this step will be of benefit to the software community, as they will have the opportunity to see the tip of the iceberg of the evidence SCO has gathered," McBride said.
Novell -- which sold the Unix technology to SCO in 1995 -- has said SCO never owned the copyrights and patents to the Unix software. SCO has claimed it owned the contracts and as such had the contractual right to prevent bits of Unix from being used in Linux.
"We strongly disagree with Novell's position and view it as a desperate measure to curry favor with the Linux community," McBride said. "I have turned the Novell matter over to our attorneys. Over the coming weeks we will take all steps we deem appropriate to rectify the issues."
A Novell spokesman told Reuters that McBride's comments were the first the company had heard of any possible legal action against it. Novell has not taken any legal action against SCO.
Though Linux has come in a number of versions over the years, SCO executives said they were for now only focused on the most recent versions.
"We're specifically concerned about version 2.4 of the Linux kernel and beyond," Chris Sontag, the senior vice president of the SCOsource unit, said on the call.
Oh please, that argument won't work here. This is an operation system code with thousands of lines of code. If they can prove that a significant amount of contiguous lines of code are identical to theirs then they have proved somebody copied it. They haven’t proved which side did the copying, just that one side did.
"But, 'for xenahasahotbutt = 1 to 10' is a very common loop control variable.. People use it all the time.. "
Sure. But by that standard, I'm sure you could find some similarities between the NT kernel and the Linux kernel. But "similarities" like that won't get you anywhere in court, any more than the fact that you once wrote a story about dinosaurs will let you successfully sue Steven Spielberg for "Jurassic Park". SCO has to present more than just similarities to make this work, and they seem to be exuding an aura that suggests that they can do much more than just show common design elements.
Two people could implement exactly the same solution, but still have discernible differences in the code. There's quite a bit of variation in coding styles, especially in C (which can lead to conflicts of religious intensity).
What I find interesting is they are disclosing the "proof" of their claims to "analysts" and "reporters". Analysts has several different connotations: if they don't provide the information to someone with the technical knowledge and ability to evaluate their claim, it's just more hot air.
LOL! I am surprised there aren't drive by's and "code turf" battles in silicon valley over this type of thing..
That makes sense.. agreed.
LOL!
I would hate to think what the gay programmers substitute here..
Aw, come on - even SCO isn't claiming that the entire kernel was ripped off, just some unspecified particular bits of it. If the Linux spinlock routines (as a random example) prove to be essentially identical to SCO's code, it really doesn't help Linux vendors to point to the rest of the kernel and say, in effect, "but look at all the code we didn't rip off!" ;)
Of course their are some similarities, they are both operating systems. Certain small chunks of any code on the market more than likely will be identical because in many cases there is only one most efficient way of coding something. However no program will have large chunks (over 1000 contiguous lines) of its code identical unless it was copied.
Damn, there goes my retirement..
Actually, it would be pretty easy to prove. The source to the Linux kernel is archived back to the beginning of public availability, and certainly since before version 2.4. It would only take a day or so at the most to establish exactly when the code in question went into the Linux kernel. Furthermore, it probably wouldn't be difficult to establish who put it in there (by examining the changelogs).
Personally, I think it's more likely that they copied Linux kernel code into SCO Unix (which is a violation of the GPL). SCO had better be prepared to conclusively demonstrate it didn't happen that way, by demonstrating the earlier existence of the questionable code in their source.
Even if SCO is right, In the end they aren't going to get much. They might be able to squeeze whoever copied the code for some money, if the target has deep pockets.
They won't be able to extort any significant license fees, because the offending code will simply be removed from the kernel and replaced with something functionally equivalent. A new release of the Linux kernel will be quickly released, and anyone can install it. Very few (if any) people will need a certain version of the kernel that happens to contain the offending code.
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