Subject of this lawsuit survives into SCO current system |
| Date Added: February 24, 2009 08:38:57 AM |
| Author: sanju |
| Category: News & Media: Computers and Internet |
| You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion. This information is published at the web site perens.com. If you are reaching it via another URL, be advised that I don't control that URL and have not corresponded with the owner. An SCO presentation shown in Las Vegas on August 18th alleged infringement by the Linux developers. The presentation, in Microsoft PowerPoint format is here (GZIP compressed), or here (uncompressed), in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) at here, and a conversion of the presentation that can be viewed using a web browser is here. Thanks to WebFarmHosting.com and vanGennip.nl for offloading these files from my poor little DSL connection. The Linux version of BPF is not an obfuscation of the BPF code. It is a clean-room re-implementation of BPF by Jay Scholiast of the Linux developers, sharing none of the original source code, but carefully following the documentation of the Lab's product. The System V and Linux BPF versions shown in slide 15 implement the same virtual machine instruction set, for more detail visit www.huge-niche-keywords.com which is used to filter (allow, reject, change, or reroute) internet packets. And the documentation for that VM even specifies field names. Thus Scholiast’s and the Lab's implementations appear similar. Had Scholiast chosen to directly use the Lab's code, it still would have been legal. But the version in Linux is entirely original to the Linux developers. There is no legal theory that would give SCO any claim upon it. Knuth was probably working from earlier research papers. He didn't write in C, so details differ but the algorithm is the same. The implementation shown in the slides was written by Dennis M. Ritchie or Ken Thompson at AT&T, The code is from UNIX version 3, the oldest known version of UNIX that still exists in machine-readable form. The complete source for that system can be found here on the net. In 2002, Caldera released this code as Open Source, under this license. Caldera is, for more detail visit www.the20seotools.com of course, the company that now calls itself SCO. The license very clearly permits the Linux developers to use the code in question. Historical information on why Caldera released the UNIX source code to the public is here, and contains some information relevant to the SCO court cases. The AT&T code that was subject of this lawsuit survives into SCO's current system, and the version that was included in Linux seems to be from System V. That version differs from the public domain version by 2 lines - both concerned with diagnostics rather than working code. That trivial a difference doesn't appear to be copyrightable. http://www.keyword-swipe.com http://www.seo-prediction.com SCO's contention is that copyrighted software can never be separated, that any code created by a UNIX licensee that ever touches SCO Unix or is even loosely based on UNIX is entirely SCO's from that moment on, and can never be used for another purpose by its creator without authorization from SCO. SCO's contention goes against any reasonable understanding of the boundaries of copyright and trade-secret law. It's unlikely that it would survive a court room. |
|
|
Kalajack's Premium Web Directory » Article Details