SCO claims against Linux shown to be bogus

[Feanorcurufinwe]

Why SCO won't show the code

At SCO's annual reseller show, the company's executives put up a couple of slides as a way of demonstrating how Unix code had been "stolen" and put into Linux. The two slides were photographed and have since appeared on Heise Online; see them here (w w w . heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.08.03-000/imh0.jpg) and here (w w w . heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.08.03-000/imh0.jpg). The escape of these slides has allowed the Linux community to do something it has been craving since the beginning of the SCO case: track down the real origins of the code that SCO claims as its own. The results, in this case, came quick and clear. They do not bode well for SCO.

The code in question is found in ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c in the 2.4 tree. It carries an SGI copyright. It seems that SGI was not entirely forthcoming in documenting the source of its source; some of the code in question was, indisputably, not written at SGI. So where does it really come from?

This code is from sys/sys/malloc.c in V7 Unix. It has been widely published; among other things, it can be found in Lion's Commentary on Unix (if you can get a copy). It featured in this 1984 Usenet posting. And, crucially, it has been circulated with the V7 Unix source, which was released by Caldera (now the SCO Group) under the BSD license. SCO would like the world to forget about that release now, but .
http://lwn.net/Articles/45019/

[section321]

1. Apprently the code dates back to at least 1979.....

and was released by SCO under the BSD license in the past. The code also predates System V, which is what SCO licensed from AT&T?

What a sham.

[papau]

2. V6 was public domain released in the 76 cxonference - V7 had the BSD

license when release by Caldera. (it was 77-78 code so why not!!!)-

so how the hell do they get to copyright the code?