The SCO vs IBM Case.
I suppose I should make some kind of mention about SCOs attempt to prove that Linux was stolen from them by IBM. The case has been going on for a while, and to be honest I’m not really following it all that closely because I don’t think SCO has a chance in hell of proving the Linux was stolen from their Unix code.
Recently, SCO has taken some heat because their own engineers have released the findings of their code reviews and even they say there is ‘no smoking gun’ to prove that Linux contains SCO code. SCO is freaking out and saying that was one single report by a single engineer and in fact many other code reviewers stated that there are areas of code that are either direct line-by-line copies between SCO and Linux, or Linux code that is so similar to SCO’s that the difference can only be attributable to an attempt to obfuscate (is that a word?) the code. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean a whit in this case.
As Paul Murphy points out in his article, here, the mere fact of identical code being present in both kernels doesn’t mean that it was stolen from SCO. Over the years, there have been several partnerships between the big boys and in the time frame of the code in question, the world was trying to bring Linux to the mainframe and many people had their fingers in the pie. In fact, SCOs own engineers stated that the code in question could just as easily have been from the BSD baseline rather than SCO’s.
I really don’t know how this is going to end, but I suspect it will end with a whimper and not a bang. I don’t think there will ever be any triumphant moments for SCO in this battle, rather I think the situation will get murkier and more convoluted as the investigation spins off in unforeseen directions.
Just in case, should I start collecting and burning Linux distros?