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

[Kevin Bowling]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 8:14 PM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just to repeat, because of a bunch of confused posts here: The breach of contract case was not about System V code in Linux. It was about non-AT&T code from System V derivatives (e.g., AIX, Dynix) into Linux. (The copyright case was completely different.) You may wonder why non-AT&T code from a System V derivative into LInux should be a legal issue. To find the answer you have to read the contract. If it sounds bonkers, then we can agree that the contract was bonkers.

Marc,

I want to thank you for disclosing your experience.  My own
understanding of all this was basically whatever groklaw said and now
that all the dust is settled it's easier to hear and consider what
else was happening.

Dynix was a BSD 4.2 derivative which would make a lot of the
surrounding discussion in this thread appropriate.  Although with
commercial OS there is no telling what kind of mixing went on, for
instance Chalie has variously described the BSD and SysV mixing going
on in AIX on this list and elsewhere.

It is pretty clear that RCU in Linux was a direct teleport of the
algorithms developed at Sequent but maybe the code underwent some
intentional churn as Grog mentions of the JFS work (for the record the
JFS in Linux is more affined to OS/2, the JFS1 and JFS2 in AIX is a
little different than both).

I wonder if at some point SCO scored an "own-goal" on both cases in
essentially the same way that USL did where during discovery you find
out that some legally dubious things happened in both directions.  It
seems like they probably could have executed some kind of shakedown or
at least a favorable situation with IBM had the stakes been lower, but
the cases were both very wide reaching and burnt off whatever kinetic
value was there into lawyer heat.

Regards,
Kevin


> I don't know how strong the copyright case was. I didn't work on it.
>
> Marc
>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 7:13 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 4, 2024, 6:54 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 04, 2024 at 06:35:30PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
>>> > On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 6:09???PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > > The thing I never got a reasonable answer to was I found code in BSD that
>>> > > was identical to code going back to at least V7.  Find bmap() in the UFS
>>> > > code and then find the same in V7.  I might be wrong about V7, might be
>>> > > 32V, might be V6.  I don't think it matters, it's the same in all of them.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > bmap() is the code that maps a logical block to a phsyical block,
>>> > > I'm quite familiar with it because I rewrote it to bmap_write() and
>>> > > bmap_read() as part of making UFS do extents:
>>> > >
>>> > > http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
>>> > >
>>> > > When all the lawsuits were going on, since I knew that code really well,
>>> > > I went off and looked and the BSD code at that time had bit for bit
>>> > > identical bmap() implementations.
>>> > >
>>> > > I never understood why BSD could claim they rewrote everything when they
>>> > > clearly had not rewritten that.
>>> > >
>>> > > I've raised this question before and I just went and looked, bmap() has
>>> > > changed.  I'm pretty sure I have Kirk's BSD source releases, if I do,
>>> > > I'm 100% sure I can back up what I'm saying.  Not sure I care enough to
>>> > > do so, it's all water under the bridge at this point.
>>> > >
>>> >
>>> > The short answer is that ffs_bmap.c was one of the 70 files that had
>>> > a AT&T copyright notice added to it as part of the AT&T vs Regents suit.
>>> > By the time 4.4BSD had been released, the file had been substantially
>>> > rewritten, but some traces of original AT&T code remained.
>>>
>>> Yeah, this is completely a false claim.  It was identical.  At least
>>> in 4.3 BSD, I can imagine that 4.4 changed it because I was pointing
>>> this out around then.
>>
>>
>> 4.3bsd wasn't claimed to be a rewrite. 4.4bsd definitely was very different. I checked before I posted. So what i said is not false. I literally had the code up side by side 20 minutes ago. It is definitely different though clearly related and derived a bit. That function is absolutely not 100% copied.
>>
>>> For the record, I'm a BSD guy, my OS was SunOS 4.x, it was a bug fixed
>>> BSD.  If there ever was a guy that wanted this to be true, it's me.
>>> It's not true, BSD ripped off Bell Labs code, that's a fact.
>>
>>
>> Except not in 4.4. 4.3 never was claimed to be a rewrite. You needed a AT&T license, prior to the ancient Unix license to get that. So there was no claim to originality prior to 4.4. I didn't look at net/2 though.
>>
>> I'll check after dinner for 4.3bsd and 4.2bsd, but since FFS/UFS is on disk different than v7fs I don't expect it to be identical.
>>
>> Warner
>
>
>
> --
> My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com