Check this out. The Slashdot Discussion of SCO’s peek at the allegedly offending code is an amazing illustration of the power of the internet. SCO claims some of their copyrighted code has been stolen and put into Linux. When they finally offer up a public view of the allegedly offending code, it takes only a matter of hours before thousands of geeks worldwide have shown that the code is actually over 30 years old and either in the public domain or already licensed under a free software license. In fact, the prior incarnations of SCO even gave away this code for free on their own website! All the links are in the discussion, but it is a strong first glimpse at how pathetic the chances are that SCO can sustain their case against IBM, et al. This army of Linux defenders will dissect every piece of evidence they can get their hands on, and IF their is found to be some truly stolen code, the predictions that it will be mere hours or weeks before kernel developers write suitable replacements also seems extraordinarily certain. The power of a motivated internet-organized community to do distributed research projects is greater than most people (and apparently SCO) realize… Update: 8/19 Bruce Perens has a great summary of the history of this code.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Place your comment