Slashdot: This is the End of SCO for Sure

“SCO is the thief who puts a gun to his own head and says give
me your money or I’ll shoot.

“I haven’t read the filings yet, but it sounds as if SCO’s main
claim is that IBM (and perhaps others) violated their
non-disclosure agreements by allowing employees who had seen the
Unix source code to work on Linux. However, Linux was developed
first on the Intel i386 processor family, way back in 1991, at
least five years before IBM took an interest in it. Linux follows
MINIX, an even earlier published-source-code system that very
clearly isn’t derived from Unix–its architecture was very
different.

“SCO claims that Linux could not have become ready for the
enterprise so quickly without use of art originating in Unix. They
seem to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have
been educated in operating systems programming, and that very
healthy communities of scientific research exist for systems
design, and that most of the enterprise-ready features originated
in research operating systems and only later were ported to
Unix.

“They claim that the Linux libraries could not have been
produced without input from Unix. But these libraries are written
to a printed specification called POSIX, published by the U.S.
government and available to the general public. The GNU C library,
and many other Linux libraries, existed long before IBM’s
involvement. We also had printed ‘man pages’ for Unix available in
bookstores without restrictions on implementation of the documented
facilities, and shelves of published documentation on Unix in every
technical bookstore.

“So, I think the claims I’ve heard are specious, and not
enforcible in court. Why, then, is SCO doing this? They want to be
purchased…”

Complete
Story