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"Proof" That Linux Project Ripped Off Unix Code Released
I found this article very interesting because of various reasons. For one, the irony of this situation and the outcome is just picture book karma. Two, UNIX is often written off as dead or not used anymore, which is far beyond the truth. Linux, developed by Linus Tevolde, has it's roots in UNIX, exactly how much of it though has often been debated and always fuels forum threads and makes hot topics.
Now here we have some big industry players with huge stakes in the two platforms, the biggest supporters and developers, taking the forum battle to court. Very expensive and not necessarily in the best interest of the development and future of either platform and their derivatives. In fact because of all this, SCO had to file for bankruptcy. Who gets that piece of the pie and what will they do with it?
Here is an extract of the article:
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IBM, which is among the largest firms pushing the open-source Linux operating system, was slammed with a $1B USD lawsuit in 2003 from SCO, one of the owners of a Unix distribution. The lawsuit alleged that IBM ripped off Linux code from the Unix codebase and was "devaluing" it.
The damages eventually swelled to $5B USD, but SCO was defeated when Novell was shown to hold most of the applicable Unix intellectual property and Novell waived the case. In the end, SCO filed for bankruptcy, and the Novell loss resulted in a ruling that SCO owes Novell $2.35M USD for copyright infringements (a total later bumped to $3.4M USD).
Even as SCO is appealing that decision, Kevin McBride, a lawyer and brother of former SCO CEO Darl McBride has released a wealth of documents showing some of the code that SCO claimed IBM's Linux ripped off.
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You win, You Lose.
We will see what the hopefully positive outcome of this will be.