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From: tony@pcunix.com
Subject: Re: Unix/Linux IP?
Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 10:44:59 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <c7agjb$m6h$1@pcls4.std.com> 
References: <c75r73$khk$1@pcls4.std.com> <c78nqp$6ju$1@hercules.btinternet.com> 

Ian Wilson <scobloke2@infotop.co.uk> wrote:
>tony@pcunix.com wrote:
>> http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B832.html

>Which says:
>"Linus wasn't inventing a new operating system; he was deliberately 
>trying to create a Unix-like OS. In that sense at least, this is 'theft'."

>I don't see how it is "theft" to write, from scratch, a piece of 
>software that implements standard published interfaces such as the Unix 

It isn't, necessarily.  That's why I said "in that sense", and put
"theft" in quotes.  THe implication is that I don't consider
that to be theft, although it certainly could be.  For example,
when Phoenix cloned the IBM bios, that could have been "theft" 
(again, note the quotes denoting non-standard use of a word),
but wasn't because of the "clean-room" procedure used (another
use of quotes to indicate that this wasn't literally a clean-room
such as might be used for chip assembly).

This could have been "theft" if Linux, for example, were an
employee of SCO or Sun and had access to source code.  That
wasn't the case, though because of the way Linux was created,
with contributions from people all over the world, SCO or
Novell or AT&T could have argued that some of those contribs
might have been from people with access to proprietary source.

Yet no one did.  That no objection was lodged may go back
to considerations about BSD as some have mentioned, or
it may be that Linux was seen as an unimportant "hobby"
OS, and in SCO's specific case it may be that the previous
management was more friendly to open source.  Those are
all good points.

Or it may be that, as you suggest, implementing publically
available interfaces was seen for what it is: legitimate
black box reverse engineeering.  And that was the point
of what I wrote at http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B832.html :
that Linux was more than popular enough in 1995 that
if there were any cloud of its origins, it should have
been looked at then by SCO, but it was not.  

Now, SCO's position may well be that there was no problem then but there
is now.  I'm not sure about that from reading recent interviews with
the miscreants.  I got the impression that their claims were more all
encompassing, so that triggered these thoughts.

-- 
tony@pcunix.com Unix/Linux/Mac OS X  resources: http://aplawrence.com
Get paid for writing about tech: http://aplawrence.com/publish.html

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