SCO Evidence Undercuts Its Linux IP Claims, Linux Advocates Say

Linux open source

"SCO is right where it doesn't matter and wrong where it does," said Eric Raymond, in a paper posted to the Web, "SCO's Evidence: This Smoking Gun Fizzles Out." Some of Linux code was copied from old Unix versions, but "the relevant ancestral code was released in open source" before it was included in Linux. Much of it was released by SCO itself, while it was still doing business as Caldera, Raymond said.

The analyses are based on information released by SCO on Monday at its SCO Forum conference in Las Vegas. SCO made a presentation including slides containing specific examples of source code from Linux that SCO claims is its intellectual property. In addition to Raymond, another Linux advocate, Bruce Perens, obtained copies of the slides and posted his own analysis, separate from Raymond's, ("Analysis of SCO's Las Vegas Slide Show."), reaching similar conclusions.

Raymond is president of the Open Source Initiative, an open source advocacy group. He is author of "The Cathedral and The Bazaar," an early influential manifesto for the open source movement. Perens is an open source consultant who was formerly strategic advisor on open source initiatives at Hewlett-Packard and senior systems programmer at Pixar Animation Studios.

SCO said it would issue comment on the analyses on Thursday or Friday.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

SCO sued IBM in March, claiming that IBM included proprietary Unix source code in Linux, and later SCO warned Linux users that they, too, could be subject to intellectual property lawsuits if they failed to obtain legitimate licenses from SCO. SCO introduced a $699 license this month for Linux users.

Code controlling memory allocation was among the code that SCO says infringes on its intellectual property. However, the code derives from a version of Unix called Fifth Edition, released in 1974, and was likely copied from a 1979 version of Unix called 32V, rather than from System V, Raymond says. That version of Unix was released into open source in January, 2002, along with the 5th Edition of Unix, the 6th Edition, and Version 7. That release was made by SCO, when it was still doing business as Caldera.

Moreover, the code appears in Linux versions for the Itanium processor, not for the commonplace 32-bit used in most PCs and Intel servers today, Raymond said. "This means that upwards of 90% of all Linux users, including the corporate users SCO is now shaking down for license fees, are running binary Linux distributions that do not include this code," Raymond said (emphasis his).

The copyright on the Linux file is by Silicon Graphics, which will not help SCO's contention that IBM stole the code, Raymond said. And the code was removed from Linux in Version 2.5, in June 2003, after being introduced in Version 2.4.19. It was removed "not because of copyright issues but because it was an ugly kluge," Raymond writes.

Perens said that the analysis of the SCO slides are particularly damaging to SCO because SCO chose the code to release, and was likely to put its best examples forward. "If this is the best SCO has to offer, they will lose," Perens says.

This story courtesy of InternetWeek .