Thursday, August 21, 2003

More Perens and SCO -- 9:23 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bruce Perens posted comments on SCO's entire slide show. It seems that the majority of the code that they claim is "stolen" is, in fact, code released under the BSD license. Code they claim is "obfuscated" is in fact this:

The Linux version of BPF [Berkeley Packet Filter] is not an obfuscation of the BPF code. It is a clean-room re-implementation of BPF by Jay Schulist of the Linux developers, sharing none of the original source code, but carefully following the documentation of the Lab's product. The System V and Linux BPF versions shown in slide 15 implement the same virtual machine instruction set, which is used to filter (allow, reject, change, or reroute) internet packets. And the documentation for that VM even specifies field names. Thus Schulist's and the Lab's implementations appear similar. Had Schulist chosen to directly use the Lab's code, it still would have been legal. But the version in Linux is entirely original to the Linux developers. There is no legal theory that would give SCO any claim upon it.

I bet IBM's and Red Hat's lawyers are drooling over all of this. Thanks Slashdot.

News for 08/21/2003

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