Posted on 08/19/2003 11:00:12 AM PDT by shadowman99
On August 18 at their trade show in Las Vegas, SCO showed code that they claim was copied into Linux in violation of their copyright or trade secrets. The German publisher Heise photographed two slides of SCO's code show and made them public on their news ticker. Heise publishes c't, a popular German computer magazine. These are the slides:
This slide has some of the "System V" source code comments deliberately obfuscated using Greek characters in a Symbol font. You can remove the obfuscation by typing in the Greek text and changing back to a Latin font. The result is:
* As part of the kernel evolution toward modular naming, the * functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. * Compatibility will be maintained by the following assembly code: * (Also see mfree/rmfree below)We haven't yet located the original source of this code, the next slide is more telling.
We've found the malloc() function this slide refers to. It is included in code copyrighed by ATT and twice released under the BSD license: once by Unix Systems Labs (ATT), and again by Caldera, the company that now calls itself SCO. The Linux developers have a legal right to make use of the code under that license. No violation of SCO's copyright or trade secrets is taking place.
The ATT source code is here on the net, from a version released around 1979, although we believe that earlier versions exist. The Caldera license letter releasing this code is here. Caldera is, of course, the company that now calls itself SCO. The license very clearly permits the Linux developers to use the code in question. Historical information on why Caldera released the Unix source code to the public is here, and contains some information relevant to the SCO court cases.
The malloc() code also appears in Lions Commentary on Unix, in this form:
Lions' book was first published in the 1980's under non-disclosure and was used as a textbook by universities that had licensed the Unix source. ATT vended a copy of this book to Unix licensees for some time, and a photocopy version was widely circulated among Unix licensees. The original SCO, before its purchase by Caldera, allowed the book to be published without any non-disclosure terms in 1996./* * Allocate size units from the given * map. Return the base of the allocated * space. * Algorithm is first fit. */ malloc(mp, size) struct map *mp; { register int a; register struct map *bp;for (bp = mp; bp->m_size; bp++) { if (bp->m_size >= size) { a = bp->m_addr; bp->m_addr =+ size; if ((bp->m_size =- size) == 0) do { bp++; (bp-1)->m_addr = bp->m_addr; while((bp-1)->m_size = bp->m_size); return(a); } } return(0); }
Another version of the algorithm was published in Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language, Prentice Hall 1978, apparently without restrictions.
Another version of the code is copyrighted by the University of California as part of the BSD Unix system that they produced for the U.S. Army and released as Open Source. That code is also under the BSD license, and appears here in this file released in 1984.
In the early 1990s, ATT's Unix Systems Labs (USL) sued BSDI, a company vending the BSD system, and the University of California, over this and other code in the BSD system. The claims that SCO is making are very similar to the ATT claims. ATT lost. It was found that ATT had copied heavily from the university without attribution, and thus ATT settled the case. In the settlement, the University agreed to add an ATT copyright notice to some files and continue to distribute them under the BSD license. ATT agreed to pay the University's court costs. Some details of the lawsuit are here.
The ATT code that was subject of this lawsuit survives into SCO's current system. SCO's "pattern analysis team" found this code and correctly concluded that it was identical to code in Unix. But they didn't take the additional step of checking whether or not the code had been released for others to copy legally.
Actually, you don't need a "pattern-analysis team" - you can just type lines of the allegedly copied program text into google.com, and google will show you where that code has been posted to the net.
My sources in this analysis are some very helpful members of the Linux community who posted information on the Linux Weekly News web site, and on this page of very useful information on the SCO cases.
I don't believe that statement is correct, I sure haven't seen any proof of it.
Oh, lord, no.
Defrauding the market to pump up your stock price is illegal. Maybe he's just doing it to keep his job (the company had never made a profit). Maybe he's doing it because his wife owns stock. Maybe he's just a meglomaniac liar with delusions of granduer.
Or maybe -- he's the tool of a puppetmaster?
!?!
***Winner!***
Baghdad-Bob "Post of the Week" award.
Excellent insight, as so often. I hardly care for SCO. But I care for America, and for the laws of it and the Holy Bible, and ANYONE who trespasses on them will have to deal with it.
Golden Eagle wrote:That letter released all of the code from the UNIX 16 bit versions it covered (and the early UNIX 32V 32 bit versions).
I fail to see any relevance to that letter you and Danger are posting everywhere. It says clearly:with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems
The code in question was in malloc.c from Unix V5, which is covered by that letter. It was also in malloc.c from Unix V7, which is also covered by that letter.
The exclusion for UNIX System III and UNIX System V applies to code that was developed later and is unique to those systems.
Otherwise, that letter is completely meaningless and none of the early UNIX code can be used becase we don't know what parts of that code are in UNIX System III and UNIX System V, so nobody can use any of the code that was "released."
Then, there's the AT&T/USL/Novell settlement with BSDI to consider. Parts of UNIX System V and UNIX System III were released to BSD under the terms of that settlement. BSD then published these portions of UNIX under the BSD Open Source license. This license is basically a "do whatever you want, just keep our copyright lines in the code" kind of license very similar to the letter from Caldera releasing the early UNIX versions. I believe that malloc.c was one of the modules released to BSD under that settlement, and that's another entirely legal source for this code being in Linux.
The copies of this code in various books will also be problematic for TSG (The SCO Group). Some of the books that contain this code were written by AT&T Bell Labs employees. AT&T Bell Labs (as a predecessor in interest to SCO) had to know about these books and did not allege copyright violations when the books were published.
Also, using sample code from a copyrighted book in developing programs for future commercial products has been held to be "fair use" by the courts. So, including code from a copyrighted book about computer programming doesn't require any release from the author of the book. If a Linux kernel programmer did that, that would not indicate a copyright violation in Linux. SCO's only course of action in that case would be against the authors and publishers of the book, and the statute of limitations has probably run out on some of those books.
If The SCO Group sues anyone over the "intellectual property rights" to this particular code, the defense is going to be that these "intellectual property" rights were neglected for over 20 years, and that this neglect either explicity or implicitly waives those rights and invalidates the claims of Caldera/The SCO Group. In the case of this particular code, that defense should prevail.
Do you think it's possible that SCO picked code that makes them look like a bunch of idiots on purpose? Is it part of a strategy to throw everyone off the scent of something else? It's an odd of piece of code to throw out there to bolster your argument.
You must have a rather narrow definition of "public domain." If I publish some obsolete code and say "Here, copy and use this freely." it is in the public domain.
It has been conclusively established that old UNIX sources have, in this way, been at various times placed in the public domain, including by the predecessor entity of the current SCO.
They have no case, and they have pursued a case as only a monumental idiot would pursue a case. They are piling up liability for themselves, for Canopy Group, and Schiller & Flexner, who will all end up as pariah to anyone using Linux - which is to say everyone.
Darl, call your broker, STAT....
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
Precisely. Reputation and known behavior matters when judging the credibility of other statements -- otherwise, a statement on personal ethics by Bill Clinton would carry the exact same credibility as a statement on that subject by His Holiness John Paul II.
The reason that anybody has to guess about the evidence based on what random samples they can glean is that SCO has refused to provide a full account of the allegedly infringing material.
It's as if I called a cop, pointed at someone down the block, and demanded that the cop arrest him because "he stole my stuff"... and then refused to answer the cop's request to describe the "stuff" that had been stolen. If I persisted in such ranting and demanding, the cop would (quite correctly) arrest me for harassing the target and making a bogus report to the police.
I can't put my hands on the article right now, but stock fraud doesn't necessary require direct sale by the officers.
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