Quote:
Originally posted by multi
ah...
didnt fully understand what parts of linux they were claiming as theirs..thx
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multi, no one fully understands what parts of the linux kernel they are talking about! They offered their 'proof' under an NDA (non disclosure agreement) that's so strict, that no sane person who wants to do coding in his or her life would sign it, basically preventing anyone with a good knowledge of the linux kernel to verify their claims. Furthermore, they showed some 80 lines of code but speak about hundreds of thousands. That 80 lines were mainly comments. The funny thing is, comments don't change the compiled binaries, besides comments were ruled irrelevant by the court in the BSD wars of the early 90s.
80 lines! If you count the lines in the linux kernel (find . -iname \*.h -o -iname \*.c | xargs cat | wc -l) you'll find that there are 3+ millions, not counting the modules.
And not that they filed a
permanent injunction. If there was any truth behind their claims, thay would have filed a preliminary injunction, to stop further 'damages'. Permanent injuntion is granted after a court verdict, while preliminary injunction can be granted right now. You only need to convince the court that your claims are valid. You see? By requesting a permanent injunction they are avoiding having to prove anything, because (as most analyst believe) they don't want this to reach the courts. They want to be bought by IBM - that was their first intent. Having failed that (IBM not taking the bait) they are spreading FUD and threats in a publicity stunt to raise their stock prices. Which is succeding, for half a year ago SCO stock was 0.90 $ - now its 10 $.
This is the first lawsuit I follow in details, for two reasons:
1) Its like a soap opera. SCO everyday surprises the world with something that is utterly crazy, thus very entertaining. (see linux and terrorists, even though it turned out to be that 9/11 guys used NT to exchange emails). Besides, export laws in the US are mainly about export of hardwares, with the one exception of cryptography. They are playing the 'terrorist card' to ride the current wave of paranoia in the Bush administration.
2) its educational. I learned a lot of things about these proceedings (also, the trick above to count the lines in the linux kernel - I knew those commands separately, but it didn't occur to me to use it that way - I mean it was logical after I saw it (use find to filter source files in the /usr/src/linux/kernel directory, pipe the result to cat while telling cat - with xargs - to diplay the content of each file one after the other - but piping that output to the wc command with -l (to display line count instead of word count). I saw that on slashdot. I learned about (I don't say that I know it, its just I never heard of this trick) what shorting means in the stock market, and many more.
So its entartainment + information = me likes it. I love information. I know my enthusiasm seems somewhat crazy, but think of as reading a magazine, new scientist, pcworld or something just for the sake of being informed, learning something, and just for the fun of it.