Linux advocate claims SCO evidence flawed

The SCO Group is 0 for 2 in its efforts to prove that its Unix software was illegally copied into the Linux operating system, according to Linux advocate Bruce Perens, who last week said he traced a second example of SCO’s disputed code and that it was lawfully included in Linux.

The SCO Group is 0 for 2 in its efforts to prove that its Unix software was illegally copied into the Linux operating system, according to Linux advocate c, who last week said he traced a second example of SCO’s disputed code and that it was lawfully included in Linux.

The revelation came the day after Linux enthusiasts claimed to have proved that SCO’s first public example of copyright violations in Linux was illegitimate.

SCO revealed the two snippets of code during a keynote address at its annual SCO Forum user conference in Las Vegas last week. German publisher Heise published the first snippet, which SCO claimed was copied line by line from Unix into Linux. The second example, which SCO claimed was an “obfuscated” – or neatly identical – copy, was obtained from SCO by IDG News Service.

At the keynote, Chris Sontag, SCO’s general manager and senior vice president of SCOsource, said the snippets were just two examples of many intellectual property violations his team found in the Linux source. “We’ve been able to find these little needles in a Mount Everest-sized haystack,” he said.

But these first two examples can be traced to the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix, and not to SCO’s AT&T Unix source code, and both are legitimately included in Linux, Perens said.

“These are probably the best examples that SCO has to show, and they’re awful,” Perens said. “They would not stand up for a day in court.”

In March, SCO sued IBM, claiming that Big Blue had inappropriately contributed code to Linux. Since then, SCO has widened its allegations about the nature of the improper contributions to Linux, and now maintains that source code belonging to SCO has been copied line-by-line into the Linux operating system.

SCO was countersued by IBM in early August, and also has been sued by Red Hat.

“The obfuscated code example is not SCO’s property,” Perens said. “It was developed by the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in 1993, under funding of the U.S. government. The code was added to SCO’s version of Unix in 1995 or 1996, he maintained. “SCO took [the BSD] source code, lost the attribution, and now believes it’s theirs.”

SCO disputed Perens’ claims. “We’re the owners of the Unix [AT&T] System V code, and so we would know what it would look like,” he said. “Until it comes to court, it’s going to be our word against theirs.”

Perens’ code analysis can be found at here.