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Open Source: Article

Like Oliver, SCO Wants 'More'

Like Oliver, SCO Wants 'More'
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
June 4, 2004 12:00 AM EDT
Reads:
 18,098
SCO told the Utah court charged with hearing its multibillion-dollar suit against IBM last Friday that from what it can piece together from the discovery IBM has produced so far the evidence that IBM ripped off SCO's Unix code and put it in Linux is there - to the tune of "tens of thousands of lines of code from AIX and Dynix" - but that it needs all of the copies of the Dynix and AIX code that it originally asked for to track down all of the SVR5 code IBM supposedly purloined.

It wants the court to order IBM to produce the missing code and the revision control systems for the operating systems.

SCO said it was able to trace at least some of what Dynix - and in turn Linux - owe to Unix from historical commentary in Dynix, but that AIX - or at least the AIX code IBM turned over to it - doesn't have historical commentary, so SCO "has had difficulty determining all the portions of AIX that were taken from Unix System V."

SCO wants IBM to turn over all interim and final versions of AIX, Dynix and ptx, the programmer notes, design documents and, "most importantly," it says, all the revision control systems that track changes to AIX and Dynix since 1984. It says IBM has only given it "selected snapshots" of AIX and has refused to provide the change-log information or the revision control information.

SCO told the court it needed a "map" to pick its way through the huge minefield of AIX and Dynix alterations, derivations and revisions and that IBM's withholding one and then filing for a summary judgment against SCO was "unconscionable."

To do a line-for-line comparison, SCO is particularly interested in all the AIX file systems, the Extended Volume Management System (EVMS), the async I/O, MPIO and standard I/O, SMP and other multiprocessing functionality, documents related to performance measurement and management, the SVR4 features in AIX, inter-process communications, and debugging and statistics gathering for both kernel and user-space functionality.

As far as Dynix and its little friend ptx go, SCO wants everything having to do with the read-copy update (RCU), NUMA, the I/O, performance enhancement, hot-swapping, the virtual file system, MP enhancements to the network file system and the System V file system.

SCO has asked for this stuff before, it told the judge, but IBM has resisted producing it. It says the court ordered it to list the lines of code that were derived for SVR5, but it can't until IBM turns over the material. It suggests that if the district court doesn't hand IBM a production order, an appeals court will.

Published June 4, 2004 – Reads 18,098
Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

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Most Recent Comments
Stormkrow 06/07/04 12:01:28 PM EDT

What happened to the "thousands of lines of code" that Darl already said they had. Or the "truckloads of stolen code" from Stowell. Or the "line by line copying". Or Enderle and DiDio saying they had seen all the evidence they needed. Hmmmmm? Now they MUST produce evidence in COURT and NOT one line of code can be found. I say criminal charges should be pending. And by the way; pay attention to who you get your IT advice from. Enderle and DiDio dont know a thing about IT and they never have. All of this was a scam by Microsoft to produce FUD and slow Linux uptake while they desperately try and fix Wronghorn and .Nyet. From what other app vendors are saying Longhorn is a huge mistake and have since started porting their apps to Linux. 2006 Linux will be very hard to beat with an inferior product.
Thomas Frayne 06/04/04 08:34:53 PM EDT

The judge twice ordered SCOG to specify all specific lines of code in Linux that SCOG claimed any rights to, and all specific lines of code in SysV that SCOG claimed IBM misused.

On the second deadline, April 19, SCOG certified that it had done so, and IBM has since claimed that SCOG did not specify any lines of code in either category. Now, in its latest filing, SCOG says that they have found no lines of SysV code in Linux or AIX/Dynix, but they need IBM to send all the development snapshots of AIX, so SCOG can fish in an immense pond for its first bit of evidence.

However, the court order agreed with IBM that SCOG was asking for too much, and defined what IBM had to send SCOG. IBM sent it in March instead of waiting until the April 19 deadline, in order to give SCOG more time to review it. This was sneaky, since the judge had ordered SCOG not to let their employees see the documents IBM delivered, only outside lawyers and contractors.

It looks like SCOG fell into the trap. Their latest court filing complains of having to pull employees off development work to review the code IBM sent.

The court order also declined to give SCOG all the AIX snapshots they wanted, and said that further discovery would depend on SCOG producing enough evidence to justify further discovery. Since SCOG has admitted in a court document that they can't find any of the specific evidence that they were ordered to produce, SCOG has no basis at all for its motion to force IBM to produce more documents.

I don't think that SCOG will get the documents it is asking for, appeal or no. Instead, I think that IBM will get the summary judgment it asked for. This judgement doesn't even depend on Novell winning its dismissal motion against SCO: that would just be frosting on the cake.
Disgusted 06/04/04 06:27:07 PM EDT

Why don't journalists actually do research into what they're writing about these days instead of writing a bunch of tripe based on things that they don't even understand? The only thing SCO has found proof of is that AIX is a derivitive of unix SVR5. Hello??? Nobody has ever denied that. The only place where that fact makes a difference is in SCO's own little world where they get to make up thier own version of law and pretend that they actually know what they're doing. Please, Please, Please get a clue. SCO has said so many different things that nothing they say makes sense anymore. SCO themselves in the very document this article is based on admit's that IBM's contributions don't violate thier copyrights. They're trying to make the judge believe that thier contract has been violated. Please disregard the law and forget about the fact that Novell has ordered us to leave IBM alone, as they have the right to do. Lets also forget that we don't even own the copyrights to SVR5. We're right just because we said so and we have the biggest mouths.