SCO Code?

For those who don't get news from outside their aggregator anymore...

“Sontag also said thousands of lines of Unix have made their way into Linux in the form of derivative works that should have been bound by SCO licensing agreements that require licensees to keep the code secret. The company said several enterprise features of Linux--the NUMA (nonuniform memory access), RCU (read-copy update), SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing), schedulers, JFS (journal file system) and XFS (extended file system) portions--all include copied code. The company broke out the number of lines of code that had been directly copied from each. It said, for example, that more than 829,000 lines of SMP code had been duplicated in Linux”
[ZDNET]

2 Comments

  • This whole story is a bunch of BS and FUD on SCO's part. In the words of your local traffic cop, "Nothing to see here, move along now."

  • SCO is all show, but with no real proof. It is glaring what is not being stated by SCO. For instance, how do they know that the code in question is theirs? Just as in the case with the early court case with BSD, the code may have originated in a prior (common) work that both SCO and Linux borrowed from. There is also the question of Caldera employee's contributing code and Caldera distributing code, thus agreeing to the GPL. My guess is this is how the code got in and why SCO is pushing so hard on the flimsy argument that the GPL is invalid because it allows copying and distribution beyond what is allowed by copyrights. The problem SCO has is that if they want to support this argument, it also means that all software licenses have a problem. All software licenses include grants and limitations beyond the standard copyright. Is SCO really stating that software licenses are in violation of the copyright? All in the software industry, no matter the license, need to pay attention to the strawman SCO is trying to pull over on the courts. It could have serious implications if successful, and not just to GPL software.

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