ZDNet Australia: Linus Torvalds Claims SCO ‘Smoking Gun’
Backfires
[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
SCO’s display of code it alleges was copied into the Linux
kernel by IBM–a piece of evidence critical to its US$3 billion
lawsuit against Big Blue–has come under fire from Linus Torvalds
and Linux advocates who claim the code shown was released under an
open-source licence several years ago…“Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, told ZDNet Australia by
e-mail the alleged blunder wasn’t a surprise. ‘Hey, that was what
we claimed was the most likely source of common code from the very
first time,’ he wrote.“‘So one code snippet was from pretty much original Unix–and
yes, Caldera released the old Unix code itself back when they still
remembered that they made all their IPO money off Linux–which is
interesting partly because it shows how SCO has been lying all
along: they said several times how they are talking about SysVr4
code, not ‘old Unix’ code, and now they show old Unix code on their
slides…'”
Los Angeles Times/Boston Globe: SCO Undercuts its Linux
Case
“The software company that claims to own key pieces of the free
Linux operating system undermined its case this week by displaying
samples of the disputed code–which critics then traced back to a
decades-old program released with few restrictions.“SCO Group Inc. set off a firestorm this year by suing IBM
Corp., alleging that the firm improperly contributed SCO-owned code
to Linux. For years, SCO and its predecessor have owned the rights
to much of Unix software, which much of Linux imitates…”