By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
There is a line from the movie Star Trek V, The Final
Frontier that I think is very parallel to the situation
between SCO, IBM, and the development of the Linux kernel. In an
otherwise medicore movie, there’s this one scene where Capt. Kirk
cuts to the heart of all of the philosophical debate about this
being called God the officers of the Enterprise have just met.
The line, which might be the most insightful line in the entire
movie, Kirk asks the being “what does God need with a
starship?”
Chaos insues, the heroes save the day, and the franchise
continues.
But that line is ringing strongly in my head as I read the
latest interviews with Darl McBride as he responds to IBM’s legal
filings in The SCO Group’s lawsuit against IBM.
In the CNET story just posted on Linux Today, McBride indicates
that there is indeed source code alledgedly copied from UnixWare
into the Linux kernel. This appears to be a major component of
their lawsuit against IBM, as they further indicate that IBM was
the one who had access to that code and plagarized it into the
Linux kernel.
If this accusation is true, and I have no idea of knowing if it
is, I would agree that this is a pretty bad thing and that every
effort should be made to get that copied code out of the Linux
kernel as quickly as possible.
But this attitude does not seem to be shared by the folks at The
SCO Group.
According to the CNET article, “McBride refused to detail which
specific code had been copied but said there were several
instances–‘some of them go back several years, and others are
recent’–and said the copying was ‘not minor.'”
So here are my questions:
Excuse me, but if this code had indeed been in the kernel for
several years, why was nothing done about it when it was first
discovered?
Anticipating a counter-reply that might say that the copied code
was not found until very recently, then I must also beg the
question, exactly how major is this copied code?
Here’s where my brain is struggling with the logic of McBride’s
statement. Is it actually possible that in all of the years that
SCO and Caldera before it worked with their own Linux distribution,
not a single person in their development team noticed old UnixWare
code in the kernel and said “hey, how did that get in there?”
And, if that code was found, why didn’t that developer or his
managers approach the Linux kernel developers or even Linus
Torvalds himself and say “we have a little problem here…”?
McBride has argued that there is “a matter of principle at
stake,” and yet his company seems to have forgotten the very
foundation of open source development: if there is a problem found
of any nature, you need to either fix it if you can or get some
help to fix the problem.
Actually, McBride hasn’t forgotten this at all, since he says
pretty much the same thing in the article:
“‘There is not an intellectual property policeman
sitting in at the check-in counter saying this is OK, this is not
OK. It is a free-for-all,’ McBride said. ‘At the end of the day,
there’s not a basis for making sure code is clean when it goes in
there.'”
He’s 100% right. You know who’s responsible for making sure that
code is clean? The people who contribute. That includes Joe
Programmer from Estonia, that includes IBM, and that includes
Caldera.
Is there UnixWare code in the Linux kernel? As I said, I don’t
know. As a former book editor, I can tell you that plagarism goes
on a lot more than it should, so I would concede it is indeed
possible that this code may have found its way into the kernel.
But I, for one, am very frustrated by this notion that SCO has
launched this lawsuit in the name of “principle” when it seems they
never tried to get this alledged code out of the kernel in the
first place.