| They're going to have a hell of a time proving that, if the code was the same.
I personally believe the lawsuit to be vexatious litigation, an attempt by rapacious, unscrupulous lawyers to induce IBM to buy their company to silence them, or at least pay them off. Why IBM? Because they have money. These same guys already sued Microsoft, and got money out of them. In the tradition of the Plaintiff's Bar, it's on to the next deep pocket! If you are new to this issue, you presumably do not know what individual is being spoken of here, so you have no way of measuring the veracity of the FUDster's claim. The individual is one Paul McKenney, an engineer once employed by Sequent Computer Company, since acquired by IBM. Mr. McKenney is the author of some code found in SCO's source library, and Mr. McKenney's work was also the basis of some very similar code found in the linux kernel. There is little doubt who put the code in linux, since it contains these comment lines:
+ * + * Copyright (c) International Business Machines Corp., 2001 + * + * Author: Dipankar Sarma + * (Based on a Dynix/ptx implementation by + * Paul Mckenney ) + * This is not an infringement of anything if both versions flow from a prior work of research. How might one "prove" the existence of prior research? And that Mr. McKenney had anything to do with it? Well, one way would be to produce a copy of Paul E. McKenney. Selecting locking primitives for parallel programs, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No. 10 (1996). Even better would be a patent application that described the invention, independent of UNIX or any other operating system, especially if that application pre-dated the first implementation on UNIX. That would make it a slam dunk. Such an application exists, because the patent was in fact awarded. The full-text image, clearly identifying Paul McKenney as a co-inventor, is on line and can be viewed at the Patent Office site. Visitors to the page will notice that the patent was applied for in 1993, and assigned to Sequent Computer, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the IBM Corporation. In other words, IBM holds a patent on technology which SCO claims is its intellectual property, and which IBM stole from it. Draw your own conclusions concerning the merits of the SCO claim, or the difficulty that IBM will have in "proving" that they own the technology in question. But this is merely one utterance of a noise machine, a single attempt to spread spurious FUD. There will be more. Many more. You will hear claims from SCO that they have found "identical, or nearly identical" sections of code in what they call "their property," and also in contributions that IBM has made to linux. The insinuation is that IBM stole these items from them. It is highly likely that a previous "SCO" acquired this code from IBM, or from Sequent, during a joint development project in 1998. It is very possible that SCO's lawyers did not know this when they filed the suit. Virtually no one at the "SCO" of today was at the "SCO" of 1998 (they are in fact different companies in different states). This an extremely complex case that turns on many esoteric technical issues, some rather fanciful lawyering, and frankly, some bald-faced lying. But because at root it is more an attempt at public extortion than a lawsuit, "sound- bite" rhetorical campaigns have been prepared to influence public opinion. The case is vulnerable to those, because it involves issues that require fairly detailed explanation to even understand. Anyone wanting to steer clear of FUD should avoid sound-bites and sound-bite campaigners. |
The statement is made that "they're going to have a hell of a time proving that." The purpose of this statement — if it even has one — is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) concerning the case in general, to slander the IBM Corporation, and perhaps to promote the idea that SCO's lawsuit has some merit.