[TriLUG] The Tide Turns: SCO's code is BSD-licensed

Sinner from the Prairy sinner at escomposlinux.org
Tue Aug 19 16:00:13 EDT 2003


Hi,

>From the article "Why SCO won't show the code" on LWN:

http://lwn.net/Articles/45019/


" At SCO's annual reseller show, the company's executives put up a couple of 
slides as a way of demonstrating how Unix code had been "stolen" and put into 
Linux. The two slides were photographed and have since appeared on Heise 
Online; see them here and here. The escape of these slides has allowed the 
Linux community to do something it has been craving since the beginning of 
the SCO case: track down the real origins of the code that SCO claims as its 
own. The results, in this case, came quick and clear. They do not bode well 
for SCO.

The code in question is found in arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c in the 2.4 tree. 
It carries an SGI copyright. It seems that SGI was not entirely forthcoming 
in documenting the source of its source; some of the code in question was, 
indisputably, not written at SGI. So where does it really come from?

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. "



Mmmmm. What will SEC say after all those shares being sold by SCO execs? 

http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Aug/08122003/business/83193.asp
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6521752.htm



Salut,
Sinner
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