johnnyv Posted October 6, 2003 Report Share Posted October 6, 2003 comparrison of 2.4.21 kernel showed approx 200 lines of similar code, code all looks to be under public domain. 2.4.22 has no similar code. Hmmm this sounds more likely than sco's "millions of lines of code copied directly" http://www.itworld.com/Man/2685/031006sgisco/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zero0w Posted October 6, 2003 Report Share Posted October 6, 2003 SGI did make use of the source comparator from ESR. I think as far as SGI is concerned, it has covered its ass and performed in good faith the duty of internal audit of its own source contribution. However, Blake Stowell's response seems to suggest that SCO's attack has no real direction; he simply suggests a line by line comparison was not "trivial" - in other words, it could be impossible for his company to do just that (and its claim of 1 million copied lines is absolutely BS in the light of this comment). I don't think SCO has any idea of whom it is going to sue but just keep saying of such meaningless threats. Each source contributor (company) who has licensed to use System V source code should make use of ESR's souce comparator to remove tainted code, if any of these could be found - however, SGI's action does not suggest any true violation as a System V licensee, as the 'arguable code' was released in BSD license earlier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JaseP Posted October 7, 2003 Report Share Posted October 7, 2003 It's just FUD to fuel the Canopy Group's stock pump and dump. Nothing to see here, move along. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zero0w Posted October 7, 2003 Report Share Posted October 7, 2003 I think more exactly is that SCO saw a few pieces of identical code between the two kernels and then implied Linux contributors stole from it. Some of these pieces, such as XFS, certainly was not owned by SCO; but as ESR pointed out, programmers who have been working with both code base might have done some causual copying; however SCO still needs to argue the identical code is of SCO's origin, not from IBM or SGI. HP, IBM and other who are SysV licensees do have some duty to make use of the source comparator to find out the identical part which (1) is SysV origin; (2) is their own contribution to Linux Kernel; (3) is NOT their own patented / copyrighted code. (4) is NOT found in the Unix source released in BSD license. Only code that is satisfied with all 4 criteria above will really need to be removed. As we can see, this is not an easy job, and I doubt the amount of code that would fit all 4 criteria above is in anyway huge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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