[NCLUG] Breaking news! SCO is full of crap (big surprise)

[J. Paul Reed]

Considering our "lively" discussions on the SCO in the past, I thought I'd
mention a slashdot story today (for all you non-dotters) talking about a
couple of examples of the "stolen" Unix source code which SCO presented at
their pathetic little trade show (which everyone from HP to IBM have been
pulling out of... but that's another story altogether).

Linux Weekly news has a story, too: http://lwn.net/Articles/45019/

"This code is from sys/sys/malloc.c in V7 Unix. It has been widely
published; among other things, it can be found in Lion's Commentary on Unix
(if you can get a copy). It featured in this 1984 Usenet posting. And,
crucially, it has been circulated with the V7 Unix source, which was
released by Caldera (now the SCO Group) under the BSD license. SCO would
like the world to forget about that release now, but the Wayback Machine
remembers.

So...SCO's code demonstration, the one that it put up to convince its
resellers of its case, comes from a version of Unix which first came out in
1979. The code was publicly circulated in the 1980's, and explicitly
released under the BSD license by [the company now known as] SCO at the
beginning of 2002. SCO might well have a complaint that SGI did not
properly give credit for the code it used. But there is no possible way the
company can argue that this code's presence in Linux is an infringement of
its copyrights.

And this, of course, is why SCO refuses to show the code that, it claims,
is copied. These claims do not stand up to even a few hours' scrutiny on
the net."

You can find pictures + analysis from Bruce Perens here:
http://perens.com/Articles/SCOCopiedCode.html

I guess this really *isn't* about IP as SCO (and their "supporters")
would claim, and really is a pump-and-dump stock scheme (if you look at the
dates all the executive staff have been selling their stock, it coincides
nicely with announcements about the legal case which resulted in driving
the stock price up: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/s/scox.html)

This is a case of Enron-wannabes trying to milk the last few dollars out of
a now-irrelevant company's decades old technology.

How sad.

Later,
Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Paul Reed -- 0xDF8708F8 || preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
To hold on to sanity too tight is insane.   -- Nick Falzone, Pushing Tin

I use PGP; you should use PGP too... if only to piss off John Ashcroft