TUHS May 2003

tuhs@tuhs.org

30 participants
38 discussions

by norman＠nose.cita.utoronto.ca

I've assembled some notes from old manuals and other sources on the formats used for on-disk file systems through the Seventh Edition: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~norman/old-unix/old-fs.html Additional notes, comments on style, and whatnot are welcome. (It may be sensible to send anything in the last two categories directly to me, rather than to the whole list.)

2 years, 6 months

Re: TUHS digest, Vol 1 #159 - 12 msgs

by Larry McVoy

> SCO is blustering more and more as the open source community exposes > them for the fruads that they have become. In the for what it is worth department, I happen to know that this stuff is more complex than it seems. For instance, I am pretty sure that ATT should have won their lawsuit over the BSD stuff and if you doubt that I'd suggest that you go compare the UFS code against the 32v or v7 code. bmap() is a good place to look. Any suggestions that that was completely rewritten are patently false, at least in my opinion. I'm a file system guy, I've done a lot of work in UFS, I'm intimately familiar with the code. In fact, I defended UFS against LFS when Kirk wouldn't (LFS is a friggin' joke, any file system hacker knows that the allocation policy is 90% of the file system). I do not have knowledge of the code it is that SCO says infringes. And I think that SCO is about as astute as I am in terms of public relations (we both tend to be our own worst enemies and I thought I was without peer in that department :-) But I suspect that there is at least some merit to what they are claiming. I have to believe that nobody is stupid enough to have zero data and jump out in public like they are doing. That's just way too far over the top. Anything is possible I guess, but doesn't it seem just a little unlikely that a corporation would commit that public a suicide? I'll probably be proved wrong but I'm a CEO, running a small company, much smaller than SCO, and there is no way I'd stick my neck out that far with no data to back it up. I'd like to think I'm smarter than they are but I tend to doubt it, they have more experience. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm

21 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate

by Wesley Parish

On Friday 30 May 2003 11:50 am, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Thursday, 29 May 2003 at 6:33:54 -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: > > In message: <BAFBB8B1.118%rob(a)vetsystems.com> > > > > Robert Tillyard <rob(a)vetsystems.com> writes: > >> I believe the legal action is over breach on contract with IBM and > >> not on copyright issues. > > > > All of SCO's statements to the court have been contractual. Their > > statements to the press have been inflated to include things that > > aren't actually alledged in the court filings. > > What's not very clear here is that there seem to be two issues. The > IBM issue is, as you say, a contractual one which about which they > have been remarkably vague. The suspension of Linux distribution is a > different matter. From http://www.lemis.com/grog/sco.html: > > On Tuesday, 27 May 2003, I spoke to Kieran O'Shaughnessy, managing > director of SCO Australia. He told me that SCO had entrusted three > independent companies to compare the code of the UnixWare and Linux > kernels. All three had come back pointing to significant > occurrences of common code ("UnixWare code", as he put it) in both > kernels. > > In view of the long and varied history of UNIX, I wondered whether > the code in question might have been legally transferred from an > older version of UNIX to Linux, so I asked him if he really meant > UnixWare and not System V.4. He stated that it was specifically > UnixWare 7. > > >> But if it turns out the IBM is guilty of lifting SCO code and > >> putting it into Linux I think SCO does have the right to get a bit > >> upset about it, after all I wouldn't be to happy if I had to > >> compete with a product that's just about free and contains code > >> that I wrote. > > > > That's the rub. Do they, in point of fact, actually have any code > > they own the Copyright to or the patent rights to? > > Of course they have lots of code with their own copyright. The > release of JFS was one example. Probably the majority of AIX was > developed by IBM, not by AT&T. It's rather similar to the issue with > 4BSD in the early 90s: with a little bit of work you could probably > replace the entire AT&T code in AIX and have a system which did not > require an SCO license. I would say that that is entirely likely. AIX was developed by IBM for IBM-specific machines running in IBM-style environments, and I can imagine that SysVRx just _doesn't_ _cut_ _the_ _mustard_. So, SCO's latching on the IBM for Monterey - RS-6000 was 64-bit, or am I getting confused? - probably gave SCO much more than it gave IBM. So ironically, if IBM donated stuff to Monterey under the terms of the agreement and later incorporated the same stuff into Linux, it _could_ look as if they had taken stuff from SysVRx/Unixware - stuff that SCO had never had the opportunity to develop if it hadn't been for Monterey and IBM's pre-existing expertise. Just some thoughts - but if that is so, I can see why IBM's not getting too het up about the whole muck-up. Wesley Parish > If you mean "is there IBM copyright code in Linux?", I think the > answer is again yes, but it's under the GPL or possibly IPL, IBM's > attempt at a compromise between proprietary licenses and the GPL. I > think they've given up on the IPL now. > > For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if SCO's claims were found to be > true. > > Greg -- Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?" You ask, "What is the most important thing?" Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata." I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."

21 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate

by norman＠nose.cs.utoronto.ca

Interesting. I suggest everyone interested in this fracas read the whole scoop at (to repeat Kenneth Stailey's pointer) http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/05/pr03033.html Here's a question of interest not to the Linux community but to the TUHS one: if, as Novell now claim, the 1995 agreement didn't convey the UNIX copyrights to SCO, under what right did SCO issue the Ancient UNIX Source Code agreements, whether the restrictive version of early 1998 or the do-as-you-like Caldera letter of early 2002? Are those agreements really valid? Norman Wilson Toronto ON

21 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: NOVELL steps up to the plate

by norman＠nose.cs.utoronto.ca

M. Warner Losh: There's another article that is saying that there are 10-15 line snippets scattered all through the kernel. Give me a break. That claim is so absurd as to be not credible on its face. I can see one or two files, maybe stretching my disbelief to its limits, but I can't see anything more pervasive than that. I agree that it sounds unlikely, and I won't give it much credit until SCO makes its evidence generally available. But it's by no means absurd. Suppose SCO invented some whizzy data structure and associated code conventions to afford especially efficient interprocessor locks. That could show up in fragments scattered throughout the kernel, and the idea itself could in fact be valuable intellectual property and the fragments a demonstration that the idea was stolen. Or suppose the issue at hand was a particular way to implement a file system switch. I was involved in adding such a thing to an old-fashioned kernel myself; it touches many little pieces of code all over the kernel that happen to do certain things to or with in-core i-nodes. If I was worried that someone had stolen such work wholesale, part of what I would look for would indeed be scattered fragments. As I say, there's no useful evidence on view at all, therefore there is no useful evidence that what I am describing is what the fuss is about. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

21 years, 5 months

where to find source to pack(1)/unpack(1)

by Kenneth Stailey

Hi, I have a cont.a.z I would like to extract. When I run it through Solaris unpack(1) there are no complaints but then I go to unarchive it with either my 3BSD derived ar11 port or Warren's 2.9BSD newoldar and get: $ file cont.a cont.a: old PDP-11 archive $ ar11 tv cont.a rwx---r-- 2/0 3505 Aug 20 17:07 1976 alog.mat rw----r-- 2/0 273 Jan 3 05:14 1978 assem rwx---r-- 2/0 6332 Aug 20 17:07 1976 atan.mat r-s--x-w- 9/49170995977 Oct 22 01:48 1974 1 1 1 1 1 ar11: phase error on 1 1 1 1 1 Same thing with newoldar. I'm thinking Solaris unpack was incompatible with the pack that was used to make the cont.a.z. Possibly endian issues. I go poking around for pack(1) in V7 and PWB and 2.11BSD but can't find anything. Any ideas? Thanks, Ken __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com

21 years, 5 months

Re: non-broken 4.3BSD set?

by Warren Toomey

In article by Robertdkeys(a)aol.com: > Warren... is there a non-broken 4.3BSD-Tahoe set somewhere? > Bob As in a bootable 4.3BSD-Tahoe kit? As far as I know, no. The Unix Archive has a broken copy in 4BSD/Distributions/4.3BSD-Tahoe, indicating that both usr.tar and src.tar are broken. It might/should be possible to merge files from the CRSG CD set from Kirk to recreate these tar files. Anybody out there have an unbroken Tahoe release? Warren

21 years, 5 months

SCO vs. IBM: Eric Raymond striking a blow for ... something

by norman＠nose.cs.utoronto.ca

Aharon Robbins: I just saw this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/nosecrets/ This either Very Smart or Very Dumb, I'm not sure which. I will just point out the recursive conflict when he says I can't talk about how this information will be applied, nor by who. You'll have to trust me, or at any rate my record as ambassador to the community ... I find it hard to take a secret No Secrets campaign seriously. If I am to be used as an example of something or to promote some cause, I think it's only fair that the campaigner tell me just what he's up to first. That such a campaign exists in the current context also sounds to me like an admission that substantial parts of Linux were in fact lifted directly from a licensed UNIX. That that might be so seems surprising; that someone would want to prove it was OK even more so. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

21 years, 5 months

Re: [TUHS] SCO vs. IBM: Eric Raymond striking a blow for ... something

by Aharon Robbins

> I find it hard to take a secret No Secrets campaign seriously. That says it well. > That such a campaign exists in the current context also sounds to > me like an admission that substantial parts of Linux were in fact > lifted directly from a licensed UNIX. That that might be so seems > surprising; that someone would want to prove it was OK even more so. I think it's more of a "How dare anyone even think licensed code was lifted? We all know better than that. I'm gonna show you that you don't even have a leg to stand on." Whatever. Anyone with any sense knows that SCO hasn't got much ground to stand on. Sadly, "anyone with any sense" likely doesn't cover the judge and the jury. Sigh. (Fade to black, as Dionne Warwick sings "Deja Vu" in the background...) Arnold

21 years, 5 months

SCO vs. IBM: Eric Raymond striking a blow for ... something

by Aharon Robbins

I just saw this: http://www.catb.org/~esr/nosecrets/ This either Very Smart or Very Dumb, I'm not sure which. I don't know that it need be discussed to death on this list, either, but I do figure that the list members will at least be interested in it. Arnold

21 years, 5 months

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TUHS May 2003