Yankee Analyst Sees SCO Code – Notes Similarities
from the more-fun-every-day dept
SCO has started their road show to pick out snippets of code they say proves their case, and show it to analysts who agree to sign an NDA. Apparently, that NDA clearly says you can speak about it if you agree with SCO’s version of things because a Yankee Group analyst says that she saw the code and the annotations are the same, suggesting it was directly copied. Of course, SCO still needs to prove that IBM did the copying. Robert Cringely has come up with a theory that SCO actually put the code into Linux themselves in recent years when they pretty openly claimed that was their intention. He points out that it’s new management at SCO that doesn’t realize they did this themselves. I’m not sure how believable that story is either. In the end, though, Cringely suggests that IBM just suck it up, buy up SCO (and the remaining IP rights from Novell) and just GPL the Unix codebase to get this out of the way. It’ll end this mess, make lots of programmers thrilled with IBM, and probably lead to IBM being able to sell a lot more hardware and services. What’s that, a business model based on giving away intellectual property? But, people keep telling me that’s not possible…
Comments on “Yankee Analyst Sees SCO Code – Notes Similarities”
Boy, this whole thing is just odd...
But I would suggest getting a little background on the analyst before you evaluate how her comments affect this story. She’s not a UNIX or LINUX or even an OS programming expert. She a journalist (used to be on the news here in Minneapolis!) and used to work for the Giga Group – which some feel had a distinct pro-Microsoft, anti-everything-else feel, although I don’t feel that way myself.
Her qualifications have largely to do with writing for and editing computer-industry publications ( was the networking senior editor at Computerworld, etc.)
None of which should be taken to imply that she’s stupid or otherwise clueless, just that she probably shouldn’t be taken to be the final (or even next to final) word.
As far as the comment stuff that she mentions goes, I remember whe I was in college that the example for FORTRAN programs we were given had the comment “If you do X, the program will blow up”. So, not having anything more clever to say, we all used the same comment (the instructor even joked about it), even though we wrote all of our code individually. So, I don’t think having similar, or even identical comments really means much by itself.
Re: Boy, this whole thing is just odd...
just that she probably shouldn’t be taken to be the final (or even next to final) word.
Good advice, as the final word will be either a legal settlement or the statement of a Judge just before the case is gaveled close.
Caldera as SCO would not go through all this trouble if they didn’t feel they had a case. All they have to do is convince a Judge is they were harmed.
Re: Re: Boy, this whole thing is just odd...
“Caldera as SCO would not go through all this trouble if they didn’t feel they had a case. All they have to do is convince a Judge is they were harmed.”
Not only that, but they have to prove they didn’t put it there, distribute it, that it isn’t public domain, and that IBM was the one that put it there.
And as if that wearen’t bad enough. Wait until next week when it’s revealed that the document they found supposedly containing an amendment giving them the right to the unix copyright was in fact… a clever forgery.
In my perusal of the Linux code
I found the following code snippets:
“Dim X As Int”
and
“X = 10”
Amazingly enough, I have a program that I wrote years ago that features code strangely familiar to that, so I believe that SCO or IBM might be infringing on my copyrights…
Re: In my perusal of the Linux code
Wow! Was that whitty! Ya know, if I wanted to see /. comments on this / code system, I’d just go over to /.
Re: Re: In my perusal of the Linux code
“Wow! Was that whitty! Ya know, if I wanted to see /. comments on this / code system, I’d just go over to /.”
You fucking cock sucker. Don’t you have anything even remotely resembling an on topic remark? Stupid piece of shit.
Re: Re: Re: In my perusal of the Linux code
Lets see here:
You have the original comment:
“Dim X As Int” (Where is that valid C code?)
Then you have the snarky comment about stupid-linux-whining-like-on-slashdot.
And now you. Calling someone a ‘cock sucker’, and complaining about how it is not ‘on topic’.
How is a BASIC construct that is made up “on topic”? And, how is YOUR comment at all positive to the discussion, or even “on topic”
Re: Re: Re:2 In my perusal of the Linux code
It’s funny.
It’s become more interesting to talk about people staying on topic than the actual merits of this case. Another point for the short attention span!
I would seriously doubt that there was any VB in the Linux core. But anything’s possible. Look at Mono, ech!