5 Nov
2024
5 Nov
'24
6:39 a.m.
On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 5:06 PM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind(a)gmail.com> wrote:
By evidence, I mean evidence that was part of the
legal case(s). Material
presented as a part of a marketing, sales, or public relations effort is
not evidence in this sense. I don't know what Darl McBride and SCO were
doing here, as I didn't work on that and only met Darl for 30 sec. (He came
over to say hello to me in a conference room, and then the lawyers came
over and told him to get away from me, for fear that he would pollute the
waters. I worked extensively with his brother, Kevin.) My understanding is
that SCO was trying to get money from Linux licenses of some sort. The
Linux community freaked out.
There were two principal legal cases. The first alleged copyright
infringement in the development of Linux. I'm not sure who exactly was
being sued, since I didn't work on this case. People tended to think that
"Linux" was being sued, but I don't think there was any such entity like
that. The second case, which I worked on, was about breach of contract
between IBM and AT&T, and SCO I guess took on the rights and obligations of
AT&T. This second case was extraordinarily complicated and, inasmuch as
most everything about it was sealed, Groklaw and people in general never
did understand what the issues were. Which, of course, didn't serve as an
impediment for them offering up opinions about it. This second case started
about 2005 and ended about two or three years ago, so it went on for about
15 years. The copyright case I think ended when it was determined that the
copyrights in question didn't belong to SCO.
The way the copyright case ended doesn't mean that Linux development
didn't violate copyrights. I'm pretty sure that it did, based on
conversations with a friend of mine who was a technical expert on that part
of the case. One might ask, how could Torvalds and all those Linux
developers violate System V copyrights since they had never seen System V
code? The answer is that corporations such as IBM also contributed to
Linux, and those corporations did have such access.
Everybody on the internet has had "access" to System V code (or almost any
mainstream Unix source code) since the mid to late 90s. None of it was
likely legal access, but it was and still is findable with google or other
search engines. But it does make similar looking things a muddier option if
you assume ill intent and deception.
If one wants to take all this seriously and
differentiate between what one
knows to be true, on the one hand, and what one thinks is true or wants to
be true, on the other hand, then I think one would realize that nobody
outside of the legal teams knows anything about the case. As I said, I know
a whole lot about part of the case(s) and next to nothing about the other
parts. Groklaw used to reprint redacted documents that had been released by
the court, a couple of which I wrote, but ignored the fact that they were
redacted and that all the juicy parts were missing. Generally, if anything
was important, it was sealed.
I just a few minutes ago glanced at the Wikipedia article "SCO–Linux
disputes" and it's not bad. It does pretty much explain the breach of
contract case. There is a section titled "IBM code in Linux" that lists
some technologies (e.g., JFS, RCU), and that's the area that I worked on. I
wrote a program that could in effect do a "diff" on entire operating
systems, hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was amazing to see the
results. Even the attorneys who were doing the suing were amazed. (Whether
all my discoveries represented actual breach of contract is a legal
question, not a technical one, and was therefore well outside the scope of
my work.)
True, but not all evidence of copying is evidence of a copyright violation.
One can say things look similar, but one needs to do a legal analysis to
know if said copying or apparent copying rises to the level of infringement
or not. Once issues like fair use, de minimis copying and scene a faire get
involved, it gets quite complicated to answer the legal question, even if
on its surface it looks like it might be copying, maybe with attempts to
conceal (since it may just be that all bubble sorts look alike once you
strip them down to semantic parts). Is it just another book about hunting
whales? Or is it too similar to Moby Dick?
Since there was no final judgement, but a negotiated settlement, we don't
have any satisfying answers.
Warner
Marc
On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 3:50 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
On Monday, 4 November 2024 at 10:35:40 -0700,
Marc Rochkind wrote:
--
*My new email address is mrochkind(a)gmail.com <mrochkind(a)gmail.com>*
Many opinions of the evidence, especially on
Groklaw, but also
elsewhere, including here. But none of these people offering
opinions have really seen the evidence,
I think that depends on what SCO (and when) claimed as evidence. They
did present slides of obfuscated code (replacing ASCII with Greek
letters in the assumption that nobody could recognize the original and
maybe that the code was too precious to show in the orignal). I can't
find that any more, and maybe its on one of the many dead links on
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/. But
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.php refers to it and
identifies the errors in the claims.
Mostly people talk about "evidence "
offered by Darl at the
start. But NONE of the actual evidence came from him. It was
researched by a team of expert witnesses on both sides, of which I
was one.
I'd be very interested to hear what else they presented. Did your
conclusions agree with mine?
Greg
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