[Am-info] SCO Investors are going to read this and bail

[John J. Urbaniak]

8+ million lines of code in the kernel???

IMO that's way too big for a kernel.

John


"Fred A. Miller" wrote:

> http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/08/technology/techinvestor/hellweg/
> index.htm
>
> "When I reached McBride on Tuesday at his office in Utah, he defended
> the executive sales as a simple case of executives finally being able
> to sell shares that were underwater until the recent run-up. And he
> argued that the amount sold is "very small" compared with the total
> number of insider shares owned.
>
> Others, however, aren't so sure. "
>
> However, Eric Hellweg misread SGI's report on its analysis of Linux
> kernel code.  SGI didn't analyze the entire 8+  million lines kernel
> code,  just those parts that it contributed.  Of those parts it found
> only 200 lines that were of questionable origin.
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33250.html
>
> "Silicon Graphics says that after an internal review, it has removed 200
> lines of source code in response to The SCO Group's threat to revoke its
> irrevocable UNIX? license. SGI acquired the rights to UNIX? System V
> from AT&T in 1985."
> ...
>
> "SCO yesterday said that this wasn't enough. "
>
> Did they expect any other response?  :-)
>
> "SCO argues that 'derivative' software libre works devalue its
> intellectual property. Which is a great argument, until you remember
> that most of the intellectual labor was made by parties other than SCO,
> and where plagiarism took place - as it undoubtedly did - the
> 'plagiarists' had every legal entitlement to do so. The SCO Group has a
> defensible case if it can prove that its commercial prospects were
> harmed by infringement. It has yet to show an example of this.  Then
> again, it doesn't have to: what matters is how effectively it can
> convince a court, rather than the peanut gallery.
>
> Meanwhile, the long phony war is set to continue well into next year.
> SCO has requested a four month delay to IBM's countersuit, which is due
> to be heard on February 4. The case isn't expected to be heard until
> 2005."
>
> Expect more delays from SCO.  They can't harass Linux adoption if they
> go to court too quickly.  Here is SGI's statement on their code
> analysis: http://www.ciol.com/content/developer/2003/103100301.asp
>
> "We quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions to open source,
> and found brief fragments of code matching System V code in three
> generic routines, all within the I/O infrastructure support for SGI's
> platform. The three code fragments had been inadvertently included and
> in fact were redundant from the start. We found better replacements
> providing the same functionality already available in the Linux kernel.
> All together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than
> 200 lines out of the more than one million lines of our overall
> contributions to Linux. ", says Rich Altmaier VP of Software, SGI.
> ...
> The three System V code fragments were apparently been placed previously
> in the public domain, which means that it is very doubtful that the SCO
> Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case."
>
> So 200 lines out of 1,000,000 and those 200 had already been released by
> Caldera to the public domain, before they changed their name to SCO:
> http://www.tribug.org/pub/tuhs/Caldera-license.pdf.  Most people come to
> the conclusion that no infringement has taken place.  Here's why:
>
> "240 West Center Street
> Orem, Utah 84057
> 801-765-4999 Fax 801-765-4481
> January 23, 2002
> Dear UNIX. enthusiasts,
> Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that
> includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code,
> including creating derived binary products created from the source
> code. The source code for which Caldera International, Inc. grants
> rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate
> on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX
> Operating System, ...."
>
> You can still download what SCO calls "ANCIENT UNIX" code at :
> http://www.tribug.org/pub/tuhs
>
> --
> "...Linux, MS-DOS, and Windows XP (also known as the Good, the Bad, and
> the Ugly)."
>
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