After examining the programming code that SCO Group claims was copied from Unix into Linux, Aberdeen Group analyst Bill Claybrook said he cannot conclude whether or not SCO's legal claims of copyright infringement have merit. Claybrook's response is contained in a new Aberdeen report entitled "SCO-IBM Lawsuit: Time for Some Changes?" In it, he discusses his experience of examining the code, as well as the larger ramifications of the pending legal action.
A former Unix-kernel programmer and computer-science professor, Claybrook
was one of three analysts invited by SCO to see the code the company alleges
was copied from Unix System V into Linux. SCO showed the code to select
industry professionals in an effort to bolster support for its lawsuit
against IBM. SCO alleges the tech powerhouse misappropriated code from Unix System V
-- SCO holds the copyright -- and copied it into Linux. IBM has denied
the charges.
Examining the Code
Upon his initial examination, Claybrook did see code and related
programming comments that were identical in both the Unix and Linux codes,
he told NewsFactor.
As he noted in his report, "The code that I was shown was from a well-known
Unix .c file. It is only one of several instances that SCO alleges that an
IHV [independent hardware vendor] directly copied System V source into
Linux. Based on what SCO showed me, the amount of alleged copied code and
comments in the .c function amounted to about 80 lines."
Even though he saw identical code in both the Unix and Linux examples he
was shown, Claybrook found the experience to be inconclusive.
"I was sitting in a Marriot in Boston looking at this stuff, and they had
the Unix System V code on the left and the Linux code on the right,"
Claybrook said. But, "just eyeballing the code" did not provide
enough information to be conclusive, he said.
"I wasn't able to look at the files on the computer, so, all I can say is, 'I
saw this stuff, and I don't know whether it's true or not.'"
More Questions
Claybrook said that he has gotten e-mails from developers he knows
questioning which version of Unix the code in question was copied from.
"All of it could have been copied from BSD Unix," he said, referring to a
version of Unix different from SCO's System V version. "I have no way of
knowing all that -- not without seeing it on the computer," he said.
"And what's weird about it is, it wasn't like they copied the whole
function," Claybrook said, referring to the programmers who allegedly copied
code. "If you pull pieces of code from one program to another, it means you
have to integrate them into your code, and then test with everything else,"
he said.
"It just doesn't make sense -- why not take the whole function?" (continued...)
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