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

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday,  4 November 2024 at 20:04:38 -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> 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?

My guess is that you saw it elsewhere.  I didn't make a deposition,
and I left IBM 6 months before the announcement of the case.

> 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.

Oh.  That changes everything.  Rather like the "viral" GPL?  The
Wikipedia page still claims

  SCO claimed that IBM had, without authorization, contributed SCO's
  intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like
  Linux operating system.

> 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?

I don't know.  It's possible, but LTC was geographically distributed,
and we (Ozlabs) were in Canberra.  I don't even know where Paul was,
though I have some recollection that it was in the NW of USA.

> 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.

That makes it all the stranger that SCO presented the malloc()
lookalike as an example, especially since they (as Caldera) had
released it a year before.  Could it be that there were two teams, one
doing the publicity and one doing the real investigation?

> 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.

JFS 1 and 2 were two very different beasts.  JFS 1 never made it to
Linux.  JFS 2 was written for Linux and (I think) later backported to
AIX.  I had initially thought that JFS 2 was a "JFS 1 lite", but in
fact it was a much better implementation.

> 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.

Understood.  From my point of view this is a technical discussion.

> 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).

... as long as you didn't mind riding bicycles.

Greg
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