[TUHS] IBM's involvement (was: SCO's "evidence" (was: RIP Darl McBride former CEO of SCO))

[Marc Rochkind]

Hi Greg! Now I remember where I had seen your name before. Perhaps I read
your deposition (if there was one)? Or just on a list of LTC staffers?

To do justice to your post and all your questions would require too much
writing and thinking, so I'll just clarify a few things.

1. The breach of contract part of the case wasn't about IBM putting System
V code into Linux. It was about IBM putting IBM code into Linux, and
McKinney's RCU was a good example. Nobody thought this was System V code or
that it had anything at all to do with AT&T. I think the LTC was staffed
with a lot of former Dynix (not sure I remember the name correctly) people,
right? And they put some of Dynix into Linux.

2. Examples that got widely talked about, such as malloc, were not good
examples of what the copyright case was about. As I said, I didn't work on
it, but I got briefed sometimes. This is an example of what I was talking
about: People thinking they knew what the issues were based on the issues
that they knew about. 99% of the evidence was sealed.

3. JFS (1 or 2, don't remember) as I recall was a tricky case. Something
like what you say, that it was developed in a clean room, but then put into
AIX and subsequently into Linux. If any AIXness got into Linux, then it was
also (like RCU) a case of IBM putting into Linux code that had come from a
System V derivative.

I would like to make it clear to the whole TUHS community that I personally
am not arguing one way or another about the ethics or legality of any of
this stuff. The contract between IBM and AT&T didn't even make sense.

I think the contribution that LTC made to Linux was enormous, not least
because it told the world that Linux was ready for prime time (e.g.,
mission critical server farms).

Marc

On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 6:34 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Monday,  4 November 2024 at 17:05:45 -0700, Marc Rochkind 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.
>
> OK, that makes sense.  Did it contradict the "evidence" that we
> mortals saw?  That wouldn't have made sense.
>
> > 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.
>
> Yes, I established that in the article that I wrote.  The real
> question is how serious the violation was.  In the case (malloc()) it
> was put in the Linux tree by somebody at SGI, and its use as
> "evidence" appeared to show that System V was still using a very old,
> inefficient memory allocation scheme.  More egg on SCO's face than
> anything.
>
> > 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.
>
> I worked for IBM's Linux Technology Centre at the time.  Everything
> was very encapsulated.  I had the task of writing a JFS 1
> implementation for Linux.  We already had JFS 2, but JFS 1 was a very
> different beast.  It was written by IBM, so you'd think that I would
> have had access to the sources.  No such luck.  All I got was the
> header files.  This was before the SCO debacle, so it wasn't a
> consequence of that.  I greatly doubt that any System V code came into
> Linux via IBM.
>
> > 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.
>
> The JFS would have been JFS 2, of course--see above.  I can't comment
> further.
>
> My understanding had been that RCU originated in Linux (Paul
> McKenney).  Following up, though, there's a patent
> (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5442758) to this effect that puts
> him in second place behind John Slingwine, and it started off at
> Sequent.  I discussed the matter with Paul at the time, and he
> dismissed the use of System V code out of hand.  Knowing Paul, I
> believe him.  What level of code similarity did you find there?
>
> > 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.
>
> Did it establish the direction of the transfer?  The other "evidence"
> that was published showed SCO claiming that the Berkeley Packet Filter
> was part of System V (which I suppose it was), but of course it went
> from BSD to System V, and presumably SCO had removed the Berkeley
> license header.  And in the RCU case, I could imagine that some of the
> RCU code found its way from Sequent to System V.
>
> Greg
> --
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-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com <mrochkind at gmail.com>*
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