Ron, there were two cases, copyright and breach-of-contract. I worked on the latter, and no publicized "evidence," such as that from Darl McBride, was relevant. My understanding is that all evidence in the copyright case was discovered by the technical experts working on their own, and that they didn't take anything from McBride either.
All that stuff from McBride and the selling of licenses was something that the SCO corporation did, not anything that the lawyers working on the actual cases had anything to do with. The Linux community reacted, and it seems still does, to this McBride stuff. It didn't react to the court cases, although it thought it did, because the evidence was sealed.
As I said in earlier posts here recently, the breach-of-contract case wasn't about AT&T code in Linux. It was about IBM- (or Sequent-) written code in Linux. The contract said that IBM was not allowed to put anything from AT&T-licensed OSes into Linux, even if what was put into Linux was from IBM additions to an OS licensed from AT&T.
Somebody here likened this to the GPL, in the sense that if you add anything to a GPL-licensed thing, the whole thing, including your stuff, is covered by the GPL. I don't know enough about the GPL to say for sure that that's actually how the GPL works.
Marc
So as I read your comment, Marc, it seems to me that , e.g., Larry's claims about bmap, right or wrong, are not germane to this case?
Just to repeat, because of a bunch of confused posts here: The breach of contract case was not about System V code in Linux. It was about non-AT&T code from System V derivatives (e.g., AIX, Dynix) into Linux. (The copyright case was completely different.) You may wonder why non-AT&T code from a System V derivative into LInux should be a legal issue. To find the answer you have to read the contract. If it sounds bonkers, then we can agree that the contract was bonkers.
I don't know how strong the copyright case was. I didn't work on it.
Marc
On Mon, Nov 4, 2024, 6:54 PM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2024 at 06:35:30PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 6:09???PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > The thing I never got a reasonable answer to was I found code in BSD that
> > was identical to code going back to at least V7. Find bmap() in the UFS
> > code and then find the same in V7. I might be wrong about V7, might be
> > 32V, might be V6. I don't think it matters, it's the same in all of them.
>
>
> bmap() is the code that maps a logical block to a phsyical block,
> > I'm quite familiar with it because I rewrote it to bmap_write() and
> > bmap_read() as part of making UFS do extents:
> >
> > http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
> >
> > When all the lawsuits were going on, since I knew that code really well,
> > I went off and looked and the BSD code at that time had bit for bit
> > identical bmap() implementations.
> >
> > I never understood why BSD could claim they rewrote everything when they
> > clearly had not rewritten that.
> >
> > I've raised this question before and I just went and looked, bmap() has
> > changed. I'm pretty sure I have Kirk's BSD source releases, if I do,
> > I'm 100% sure I can back up what I'm saying. Not sure I care enough to
> > do so, it's all water under the bridge at this point.
> >
>
> The short answer is that ffs_bmap.c was one of the 70 files that had
> a AT&T copyright notice added to it as part of the AT&T vs Regents suit.
> By the time 4.4BSD had been released, the file had been substantially
> rewritten, but some traces of original AT&T code remained.
Yeah, this is completely a false claim. It was identical. At least
in 4.3 BSD, I can imagine that 4.4 changed it because I was pointing
this out around then.
4.3bsd wasn't claimed to be a rewrite. 4.4bsd definitely was very different. I checked before I posted. So what i said is not false. I literally had the code up side by side 20 minutes ago. It is definitely different though clearly related and derived a bit. That function is absolutely not 100% copied.
For the record, I'm a BSD guy, my OS was SunOS 4.x, it was a bug fixed
BSD. If there ever was a guy that wanted this to be true, it's me.
It's not true, BSD ripped off Bell Labs code, that's a fact.
Except not in 4.4. 4.3 never was claimed to be a rewrite. You needed a AT&T license, prior to the ancient Unix license to get that. So there was no claim to originality prior to 4.4. I didn't look at net/2 though.
I'll check after dinner for 4.3bsd and 4.2bsd, but since FFS/UFS is on disk different than v7fs I don't expect it to be identical.
Warner
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