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| SCO's Expert Marc Rochkind Uses Ubuntu Linux as a Server! -- & More M&C: COHERENT, MKS, & X/Open |
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Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 10:01 AM EDT
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SCO's expert, Marc Rochkind, on April 29 put on his blog a report on his daughter using Ubuntu Linux, saying she didn't even realize it wasn't Windows until he told her. That's nice to know. But here's the odd part: Anyway, yesterday my daughter wanted to use one of my computers to check something on the web. She always uses the Dell running Windows, at the end of the table, never the Mac in the corner position, because she knows that I'm likely to want to get to the Mac at any time.
But the Dell is really two Dells connected to one screen and keyboard via a KVM switch, and it's usually switched to the Windows machine. The other machine runs Ubuntu Linux, and usually doesn't have the screen and keyboard because I use it mostly as a server.
Isn't that the most peculiar thing? If Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX, chockablock full of protected Unix System V methods and concepts, as he claims, why is he using it? Is he a pirate? Or has he paid SCOsource for the right to run "their" IP? I know, it's silly. From all we can see, SCO has no rights to anything in Linux, but if SCO's own expert is running Linux as a server, why shouldn't you? As for Mr. Rochkind's favorite topic in the litigation, methods and concepts, I have a few more items to share with you, and I think I can demonstrate that Mr. Rochkind can run Ubuntu Linux as a server without fear.
Today's Unix methods and concepts history lesson covers the MKS toolkit, X/Open, and the Mark Williams Company's COHERENT.
The MKS Toolkit
I thought you'd enjoy visiting the MKS Toolkit site. The MKS toolkit provides Unix tools for Windows developers and administrators. If you are interested in UNIX methods and concepts, you can certainly load up there, and I hear that's been true for years. For example, here's an article in Unix Review from January 2000, when MKS NuTCRACKER was combined with the toolkit, after NuTCRACKER was bought from DataFocus by Mortice Kern Systems Inc. and provided to the public so Windows NT developers and users could have a "seamless UNIX development environment": The primary focus of NuTCRACKER is on application development, and that's where the last two aspects of the package come into play. The third part of NuTCRACKER provides 2,700 APIs for porting to NT's development platform from a number of UNIX versions. The final aspect of NuTCRACKER is a set of conversion utilities that let you update legacy UNIX applications to take advantage of current OS features....
The core of NuTCRACKER is the Operating Environment (OE) which provides the UNIX subsystem under Windows. The OE is built out of a number of Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) and a service manager that handles the processes and persistence across processes. A console service is part of the package in order to provide curses capabilities. You can choose a number of OE options, including X servers from both WRQ and SCO, Hummingbird's OpenGL (used for 3-D graphics), XRT's PDS (embedded widgets for 3-D), Wintif (for a Motif look and feel), and a Telnet server for remote character access. NuTCRACKER is POSIX2 compliant (MKS has been involved with POSIX for many years) and also works with non-POSIX AIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris APIs.
It would be a mistake to think of NuTCRACKER only as a porting tool. While that may be its most attractive feature, we quickly found ourselves thinking of it as a dual-environment API. Including NuTCRACKER calls adds minimal overhead, and allows you to keep a single software code base for two OSs. Whether you intend to roll out an application primarily under Windows or UNIX, it doesn't matter: adding the NuTCRACKER code takes a fraction of the total development time and gives you the flexibility to expand platforms with almost no effort later. If you are developing specifically for two OSs, NuTCRACKER simplifies the process enormously....
Samba and NFS are fully supported by NuTCRACKER applications. An NFS client is part of the NuTCRACKER Professional package, and an NFS Server can be purchased as part of Microsoft's Services for UNIX (which MKS helped develop). Remote APIs like rexec and rcmd are also supported.
By the way, the author of the article was Tim Parker, who is listed as being "technical editor of SCO World". I gather it was a magazine all about SCO, not by them. Here's some bio info on Dr. Parker, who has written over 50 books and 1,200 magazine articles, ten of them about Linux. Here's an article by Rick Wayne in Dr. Dobb's Portal from June 11, 2004 that explains what the fabled toolkit is: Its primary goal remains the same: Developers and administrators working on Microsoft operating systems access should root through the same bulging toolbox toted by their Unix brethren. Even if you’re not already Unix-compatible, you owe it to yourself to see what we shell-heads are always going on about.
A note on the term Unix: I’m probably going to get Darl McBride on my case here (not that SCO actually owns the trademark, but on the form to date, I doubt that’ll stop him). But in this review, I’ll use Unix fairly loosely, meaning “that entire family of more or less Posix-compatible operating systems, including Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris and BSD that support the tools we’re talking about.” See The Open Group’s website (which does own the trademark) for the Unix scoop: what it is, where it came from, what flavors came when and more. X/Open (now The Open Group) Novell actually transferred more than just the trademark to X/Open. It also transferred the specification. Dr. Stupid explained it to me like this: SCO's "experts"
claim that the layout of the UNIX filesystem is somehow theirs. But
that is partly defined by POSIX/SUS, and the Open Group "owns" that
standard. More generally, the Open Group is empowered to define what
UNIX is. The whole idea of the transfers to the Open Group is that
someone can create a UNIX and need no-one's permission other than that
of the Open Group. That implies that those M&Cs necessary to use in
order to achieve POSIX compliance can (if they can be owned at all)
only be owned by the Open Group. When Novell divested itself of UNIX
(the product) it did so in such a way as to make sure no other company
could buy up UNIX *the idea*... There are, of course, some recent things in Unix that were not transferred to the Open Group back then, obviously, but file systems, the overall structure? To the extent that those methods and concepts belong to anyone, they appear to belong to the Open Group, because Novell arranged it that way. You can certainly find plenty of Unix methods and concepts on pages like this one, The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6. Getting back to the Dr. Dobb's article on the toolkit, in the box at the bottom of the page, it lists some pros: MKS includes an extensive documentation set, plus one year of phone and update support.
For example, here's their MKS Toolkit UNIX APIs Reference documentation page. Here is just some of what you can learn about on that page:
statfs() — get information about file system (deprecated)
— get information about file system
statvfs64() — get information about file system If you click on any of the links, for example the statfs() link, you find conformance information: CONFORMANCE
SVR4, with exceptions.
Maybe you are curious about errno, "global variable used to return error values": CONFORMANCE
UNIX 98, with exceptions. Or strerror_r, "map errno value to error message string": CONFORMANCE
ANSI/ISO 9899-1990, with exceptions.
By the way, here's a Unix FAQ from 1997, which tells us that Unix SVR4 was a "merge of System V, BSD, and SunOS, and it's interesting to see what came from Sun: - SVR4 (1988), mainstream of Unix implementations, merge of
System V, BSD, and SunOS.
- From SVR3: sysadmin, terminal I/F, printer (from BSD?),
RFS, STREAMS, uucp
- From BSD: FFS, TCP/IP, sockets, select(), csh
- From SunOS: NFS, OpenLook GUI, X11/NeWS, virtual memory
subsystem with memory-mapped files, shared libraries
(!= SVR3 ones?)
- ksh
- ANSI C
- Internationalization (8-bit clean)
- ABI (Application Binary Interface -- routines instead of traps)
- POSIX, X/Open, SVID3 And here's some information the page provides on BSD: Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Typical of VAXen, RISCs,
many workstations. More dynamic, research versions now than
System V. BSD is responsible for much of the popularity of
Unix. Most enhancements to Unix started here. The group
responsible at UCB (University of California at Berkeley) is
the Computer System Research Group (CSRG). They closed down
in 1992. Newsgroup: comp.unix.bsd. It then lists each BSD release's offerings, including 4.3 Reno (1990), which lists "NFS (from Sun)." COHERENT While we are on the subject of methods and concepts, check out this review of Coherent 4.0 by Bradley M. Small in the June 1993 issue of Compute! magazine. What was Coherent?: For many computer users the only question has been whether to run OS/2 or DOS alone or DOS with Windows. COHERENT (Mark Williams Company....) should be another option under consideration. COHERENT 4.0 is a 32-bit UNIX-like operating system for the Intel 386 or higher....
If you're trying to learn UNIX or have UNIX at the office and want something similar at home, COHERENT 4.0 is a very close clone of UNIX System V It has most of the tools that you would expect to see on many Unices (the plural of UNIX). For those of you familiar with the GNU (GNU'S Not UNIX) project (Free Software Foundation, 675 Massach setts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; 617-876-3296), Mark Williams is currently finishing the port of both the GNU (ANSI standard) C/C++ 2.3 compiler as well as the GNU tools, a selection of programming, development, and general file-manipulation tools. Mark Williams will be making the compiler and the tools available for $49.95 each and the source to the compiler available for $99.95.
One other service worth mentioning is the Mark Williams Bulletin Board. On this you may read mail or news and ask questions and download updates or software packages, most of which will even include source code. It is accessed using UUCP, a mail package that comes with COHERENT. It takes a little effort to set up, but if you take the time to follow the manual, it's not that difficult.
If you have a business and your VAR/dealer tells you that the solution you need includes a UNIX operating system, COHERENT is only $99.95 and doesn't require a license from AT&T. Ah, yes, methods and concepts galore, and nobody sued them. I happen to have the book the Mark Williams Company published on Coherent, copyright 1982, 1990, "COHERENT: A Multi-User, Multi-Tasking Operating System for the IBM PC/AT and Compatible 286 or 386 Based Computers." It's a manual in two parts. The first part is a set of tutorials. Part two is "The Lexicon," and here is how the manual describes what you will find in it: The Lexicon consists of more than 700 brief articles that summarize all library routines, system calls, and commands available under the COHERENT system. Interested in technical information on errno? On page 615 of the book, the Lexicon's half, it tells us this: errno is an external integer that COHERENT links into every program. COHERENT sets errno to the negative value of any error status returned by COHERENT to the functions that perform COHERENT system calls. Mathematical functions use errno to indicate classifications of errors on return. errno is defined within the header file errno.h. There's plenty more, but I just wanted you to know that COHERENT includes, among other header files listed on page 688, errno.h.
There's a discussion about COHERENT, and why it ended up going bust, on alt.folklore.computers, and one guy mentions something I didn't know, and it has a bearing on methods and concepts: In the eighties, there were plenty of attempts to produce Unix clones for
the small computers (and I'm not talking about Xenix). Some were
apparently a better emulation than others. I never tried any of them, but
it always seemed a bit suspicious that they could get the results for so
much less and on small computers. Remember, the computers back then were
small compared to today. So COHERENT wasn't even the only Unix clone that nobody sued. Why not, if SCO's version of history is true? The answer can be found a little further down in the page, a comment dated April 10, 1998 from Dennis Ritchie, who ought to know:
From: Dennis Ritchie - view profile
Date: Fri, Apr 10 1998 12:00 am
Email: Dennis Ritchie
Groups: alt.folklore.computers
An anecdote: sometime fairly early after the Mark Williams company
started offering their Coherent system (a Unix clone), some AT&T
legal people asked me to visit Mark Williams for purposes of determining
whether what they were offering was a rip-off (i.e. essentially
a copy) of the currently licensed Unix done by us. I find it
hard to reconstruct the date this happened, but it was a long
time ago; probably early 1980s. I went to Chicago with Otis
Wilson, who was then involved in Unix licensing.
It was a rather strange experience. The Mark Williams company
was a paint producer, and I was given to understand that
the subsidiary that was doing Coherent was, approximately,
a corporation arranged by a father who, approaching
retirement, had more or less shut down the older business
and was using the corporate name and legal setup to help
his son in a new venture.
Otis and I visited the offices of Mark Williams on the outskirts
of Chicago and were received with courtesy and some deference.
We talked to the father and the son (Bob Swartz, i.e. the guy
behind Coherent). There had been communication before, and
from their point of view we were like the IRS auditors coming
in. From my point of view, I felt the same, except that playing
that role was a new, and not particularly welcome, experience.
The locale of the company was in an industrial section and
it definitely retained the flavor of a the offices
of a paint company being recycled.
What I actually did was to play around with Coherent and look for
peculiarities, bugs, etc. that I knew about in the Unix distributions
of the time. Whatever legal stuff had been talked about in the
letters between MWC and AT&T didn't allow us to look at their source.
I'd made some notes about things to look for.
I concluded two things:
First, that it was very hard to believe that Coherent and its basic
applications were not created without considerable study of the
OS code and details of its applications.
Second, that looking at various corners convinced me that I couldn't
find anything that was copied. It might have been that some parts were
written with our source nearby, but at least the effort had been
made to rewrite. If it came to it, I could never honestly testify
that my opinion was that what they generated was irreproducible from
the manual.
I wrote up a detailed description of this. I can't find it, probably
because at the time I was advised that it was privileged lawyer/client
material. Partly at the time, partly thereafter, I learned that
a variety of Unix enthusiasts (several from U. Toronto) had spent
time there.
In the event, "we" (=AT&T) backed off, possibly after other
thinking and investigation that I'd wasn't involved in.
So far as I know, after that MWC and Coherent were free to offer
their system and allow it to succeed or fail in the market.
I suppose there's a second story about the suit by USL against
BSDI and then UCB, but my own involvement was far tinier
and didn't get me a trip to Falls Church or Berkeley to snoop.
What advice I offered in this situation was exactly in line with
that about MWC/Coherent, and as it turned out the resolution
(though more costly for all) was pretty much the same.
(As a capper, Bob Swartz came by Bell Labs a week or so ago,
and we had a pleasant social visit.)
Dennis
So, having read that, does it match what SCO would like to tell the court, via, for example, Mitzi Bond, that what was protected was not just code but methods and concepts as well? If SCO's version were true, AT&T would have had to sue the Mark Williams Company for selling an operating system that was nothing but Unix methods and concepts. In any case, they didn't sue. And all the methods and concepts were released to the world, without objection from AT&T. Note that AT&T's Otis Wilson went with Ritchie. He has provided testimony that all AT&T was interested in protecting was the code, not methods and concepts, so long as no code was included ("[W]e did not intend to exercise any control or restriction on those products that did not contain portions of the software products."). Put that together with this anecdote, and I think -- SCO's attempts to say otherwise notwithstanding -- it's pretty obvious that AT&T was only interested in code, just as he has said. And that is exactly what IBM has told the court. All of which means to me that Mr. Rochkind can keep running Ubuntu Linux for his server without fear of consequences, other than us having a good laugh.
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| Authored by: feldegast on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 10:11 AM EDT |
So PJ can find them
---
IANAL
The above post is (C)Copyright 2006 and released under the Creative Commons
License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: feldegast on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 10:13 AM EDT |
Please make links clickable, when using links submit in HTML mode and please
preview posts to ensure links work
Thanks.
---
IANAL
The above post is (C)Copyright 2006 and released under the Creative Commons
License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 10:28 AM EDT |
| . . . (other than the eleven that remain from IBMs motion) how possible is it
that we (the public) could see the Linux portion of the code? Just the Linux
parts?
I don't see what possible harm there would be. It's already public
and in use.
I think it would be interesting to see what we could dig up about
it the history
that might be helpful to IBM (although, or course, IBM would be
bound by all
normal rules of evidence, so they could use whatever help we
provided only
as pointers, they would need to verify it themselves through
other means if it
turned out to be helpful). I suppose it could be argued that
this would be
prejudicial to SCO, but that's only because the facts are
prejudicial to SCO. If
SCO wasn't lying then it could possibly have been
beneficial to SCO.
I don't see any argument for keeping it (the Linux code)
secret other than it
interferes with SCO's ability to misrepresent their case.
On the other hand, it
seems like substatial public interest could be argued for
releasing it. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: gvc on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 10:29 AM EDT |
MKS toolkit was quite mature in 1992, when I used it extensively. I probably
have a boxed version in my basement someplace.
Working as a systems integrator, I couldn't have lived without it. Vanilla
DOS/Windows boxes came with abysmal tools for file management. tar, compress,
dd, sort, grep -- all indispensible. Even editing a simple text file was a
nightmare without MKS vi -- anybody here tried to use edlin?
My solution was to carry an MKS floppy with me to client sites. Worked like a
charm.[ Reply to This | # ]
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- MKS is much older than 2000! - Authored by: N. on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:02 AM EDT
- MKS is much older than 2000! - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:48 AM EDT
- MKS goes back to the 80s - Authored by: AJWM on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:48 AM EDT
- Cygwin - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 02:54 PM EDT
- Cygwin - Authored by: Ed L. on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 08:07 PM EDT
- Cygwin - Authored by: Jude on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 09:14 PM EDT
- Edlin - Authored by: arthurpaliden on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 01:23 PM EDT
- I used MKS toolkit in 1988 - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 02:59 PM EDT
- MKS is much older than 2000! - Authored by: greybeard on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 03:33 PM EDT
- MKS is older than Linux - Authored by: xtifr on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 04:50 PM EDT
- Copyright Mortice Kern Systems Inc., 1985, 1996. - Authored by: UncleJosh on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 06:46 PM EDT
- MKS is much older than 1985? - Authored by: mtew on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 01:56 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Bill The Cat on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 10:45 AM EDT |
Remember that there is the Kernel, the OS, the Utilities and the Applications.
The Utilities and Applications usually get bundled with the Linux OS and Kernel
but they are not part of the OS.
Is SCO claiming the Utilities (grep, dd, df, etc.) and the Applications (gopher,
mail, ftp, etc.) as part of the OS?
This is a fuzzy area in this litigation game.
---
Bill Catz[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:02 AM EDT |
| PJ, the MKS toolkit is much older than you think. If I remember correctly, it
dates back to the mid-to late-80's. I'm aware of this because porting to
Windows was
an issue for some Unix software I was developing at the
time.
J
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:30 AM EDT |
...and SCO's lawyers are probably running Samba on Linux for their file servers
also. So much for "clean hands"!
Hey IBM -- first question to ask any SCO exec or "expert" is "are
you running Linux at work or at home?".
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:31 AM EDT |
Unix is what he knows and writes about. Linux and OSX should feel quite
familiar. They are also increasingly more important, it is crucial to be
familair with what they can do.
Perhaps I am being too merciful to Mr. Rochkind, but I don't condem him for
participating in this farce. In litigation, there are two sides, in adversarial
roles. Both sides should have access to the resources to tell their story. If
SCO could not GET an expert, would that be fair?
I would have trouble working up a declaration in support of SCO. But if they
could not get ANYONE else, would I be willing to answer some of their questions
in a declaration? What would the outcome be if that did not happen?
I don't assume that Mr. Rochkind is fully supporting SCO in this mess. Could it
be that he just wanted to make sure that there is a fair expert presentation of
SCO's position?
An analogy would be playing Edward Rutlidge in 1776. If that character does not
come off implacably in favor of slavery, he does a disservice to history and the
need to eliminate the freedom of the slaves right then. The actor MUST present
the character true to history, or he robs the character of the men who
compromised. The actor probably finds himself feeling diferently about the
subject...[ Reply to This | # ]
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- if SCOG could not get an expert ... - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:43 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Night Flyer on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 11:58 AM EDT |
"SCO's expert, Marc Rochkind, on April 29 put on his blog ... [he uses]
Ubuntu Linux...".
This raises all sorts of thoughts:
1.) How might the court (perhaps through IBM request) deal with this revelation?
I presume that, for IBM to use this in court, it would have to know with
certainty that Mr. Rochkind does not have a SCOsource license. If SCO were to
grant this retroactively, what might that mean in a credibility and/or legal
sense?
2.) On the surface, it does seem to undermine SCO's case, but then, so do most
truthful accounts of UNIX history. (I did actually snicker a couple of times as
I read the article.)
3.) I think we would all like 'expert testimony' to be trustworthy, but it
reminds me that we need to be ever vigilant. The term 'you get what you pay
for' shouldn't apply to expert witnesses, but maybe it does in this case.
4.) Looking outside of our immediate group that is following the day-to-day
legal battle, it reminds mr that Linux and UNIX are doing their own battle in
the 'public consciousness' (read this as the full IT community and related
corporate managers) and, not to be overlooked, Microsoft Windows and Linux,
before the general public.
5.) I feel that SCO has done terrible (maybe terminal) damage to UNIX, which
hurts me because I have respect for UNIX and for the people that created it and
use it. SCO's greed for windfall profits from IBM and others should not have
been able to effectively end the life of a program built by the hard work of
thousands of programmers over decades of time.
As evidence to the extent of the damage, I ask the question: How many new
companies/customers have gone to UNIX since the lawsuit started, versus how many
now use alternatives?
---
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Veritas Vincit - Truth Conquers[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: fredex on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 12:40 PM EDT |
I, too, have one of the last editions of the Coherent Lexicon on the shelf here.
Written in large part by Fred Butzen, it was one of the best Unix manuals I've
ever encountered. I started running Coherent at home in 1992 when I finally
bought a '386-class computer. I wasn't even slightly interested in windoze even
then and a "real" unix was waaaaaaay too pricey. I recall that a
4-user licensed version of SCO Unix was around a grand, with a similarly
outrageous price for the development system. So, Coherent for $99 was a great
deal! Sure, it was a much smaller and more limited system (no VM, limited X,
etc), but I survived nicely with it until 1995. After MWC went out of business
in '95 I switched over to Slackware Linux (2.1, with a 1.5.59 kernel, if I
remember rightly) and boy was it a much nicer system!
I've seen that tale by Dennis Ritchie, concerning his trip to MWC in Chicago,
previously. I think it is surely one more useful bit of straw to heap on the
camel's back, along with many others, to show that The SCOTanic's Methods &
Concepts claims are so much hooey.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 01:06 PM EDT |
| I believe that SVR3 shared libraries were static shared libraries, while
the newer stuff that Sun provided involved dynamic shared
libraries.
In a static shared library system, when a program (a client of
the libraries) is "linked" to the libraries as part of its preparation for
becoming usable on the system, the exact memory addresses of each function in
the library is determined and finalized. The library code is not made part of
the linked result, but in a way the libraries are linked more like static
libraries than shared libraries.
In a dynamic shared library system (like
almost all modern operating systems), the library code is only loosely linked to
programs. The final job of wiring up the low-level machine instructions so that
library functions are properly available is deferred to the point at which a
program is actually launched.
The primary advantage is that libraries can
change (a little) in a dynamic linking environment with no need to relink client
programs. For example, as long as the basic semantics of the APIs do not change,
bugs can be fixed or performance can be improved or even new APIs can be
added.
The switch-over from COFF to ELF came with the switch from SVR3
shared libraries to newer dynamic linking technology. I personally worked as a
member of the Ultrix group at DEC (now part of Compaq - oh wait, now part of HP)
back in late 1990 and early 1991, porting the MIPS compiler suite to run on the
OSF-1 kernel slated for the then-new version of Ultrix. Specifically I worked
on the linker ("ld"), getting the weird MIPS dynamic shared library code
working. Even at that time, ELF was supported by the MIPS tools, though it was
quite new at the time. I don't recall whether DEC intended to support it. (DEC
did not use the more explicitly Mach object format that Next and Apple adopted.) [ Reply to This | # ]
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- Thank you - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 06:23 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 01:14 PM EDT |
In the COHERENT review above is this quote: "It is accessed using UUCP, a
mail package that comes with COHERENT."
It should be noted that UUCP is not actually a mail package, though there was a
time when it was involved in transporting mail (but not reading or writing
mail). It's actually just what the name (Unix to Unix CoPy) implies, software to
copy things from one Unix computer to another, runnable from cron, as well as
manually.
Larry N.
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| Authored by: ewe2 on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 01:18 PM EDT |
Those interested in Coherent's methods and concepts might like to see them
via a Unix Heritage Society mirror under
Other/Coherent where you can find the kernel source for the 4.2 release. Allow
me to quote from the comment at the top of errno.h:
Error numbers for
DDI/DKI drivers, as described in errnos (D5DK) in the System V, Release 4
Multiprocessor "Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface Reference
Manual".
Actual numeric values of error constants are derived
from the System V ABI"Intel 386 Processor Supplement".
If
these definitions are to be imported by , they *must* be macros rather than
enumerations or other kinds of constant, as required by the ISO C standard
(ISO/IEC 9989-1990).
User-level programs should not use this
file directly.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Dave23 on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 01:28 PM EDT |
| Please remember that the ultimate goal of Linux foes is not to destroy Linux
per se; but to pwn it (as they say in l33t), that is, to destroy it as an
independent, non-proprietary operating system. That is, they wish, for no
technical effort, to collect large sums of money for the already extant copies
of Linux in circulation, and for every new copy of Linux distributed. To quote
Abraham Lincoln, "[This] is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and
earn bread, and I'll eat it.'"
More specifically, their goal is not to
void all of the GPL; but their goal is to void just the pesky restrictive
distribution licensure clauses that effectively prevent proprietorization of
extensions and their source. They have tried several approaches and so far all
of them have failed.
So, yes, I can see how Mr. Rochkind can be
comfortable in using Linux as a server. But he's evidently not at all
comfortable with the business model required to use Linux to make money.
---
Nonlawyer Gawker [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 02:41 PM EDT |
After reading this the only question I have is:
Why was Mark Williams not taken
to task for his $99 source code fee? If his tools were a port of the GNU
compiler, why did the $49 package not include the source code? was it not
licensed under a GPL version?
Off topic I know, but it's got me curious!
Nathan.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 03:01 PM EDT |
Rochkind used 4 systems when he wrote the 2nd edition of his book: Solaris 8,
SuSe 8, FreeBSD 4.6 & Darwin 6.8.
What would *really* be shocking is if he didn't have a Linux system. Is there
any evidence he agrees w/ SCO's ownership claim? All he's done (from what I've
read) is state that Linux is another implementation of Unix. In the late 80's
and early 90's Coherent was much better than Minix or Linux if you wanted to get
things done w/ your system as opposed to learn about OS internals.
My point is this:
Rochkind is in the business of understanding and describing how to program in
the Unix environment. Linux is a particular implementation of that environment,
just as Coherent & Idris were. Like anyone who deals w/ programming in the
Unix environment, he has multiple implementations available to use and compare.
And just for fun, here's my candidate for the world's most obvious patent,
4,956,809, assigned to Mark Williams Co. To their credit I'm unaware of any
attempt to enforce it. The amount of prior art and the obviousness test make it
invalid, but it *was* granted. (for the non-technical, transmitting data in a
canonical "network byte order" underlies the entire TCP/IP based
Internet, it's also Big Endian like God intended, but that's another topic ;-)
rhb[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Alan(UK) on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 06:09 PM EDT |
I realise that I am getting confused by this case, so I hope someone would
clarify things for me.
Does SCO still claim that any of their alleged trademarks, patents, or
copyrights are currently being infringed by any distribution of Linux?
Revealing negative know-how may infringe some supposed condition of contract
with IBM but I cannot see how this can taint any actual piece of software
produced by some other party.
If errorno.h is still in the list of SCO's infringing code, can this
infringement transfer to the compiled binary?
So, my question is; does Marc Rochkind even need a licence from SCO?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: iceworm on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 07:01 PM EDT |
Way back in 1980 or 1981, I became aware of UNIX.
Skipping ahead past a long
and interesting story about me,
I actually purchased COHERENT in 1991. I had a
386 which
did not cut the mustard. I got the CLI, but lacked RAM and
hard disk
space to install and run X.
My parents lived in Clarendon Hills,
Illinois, which is
about ten miles south of where Mark Williams Company had
its offices. So, on a visit to my parents (late 1991 or
early 1992, as far as
I can remember), I paid a visit to
the Mark Williams Company. I met the
president who kindly
introduced me to one of the back room geeks where we had a
nice technical discussion.
Sometime in 1992, I heard about Linux, but I
was very
doubtful. I never did get COHERENT to a useful state when
I tried a
free cd in about 1995. Clearly, (GNU) Linux, the
free(dom) operating system ate
COHERENT's lunch.
I had the floppies and documentation around until a
year or two ago when I got rid of it along with my Caldera
free cd.
Wow! I am really delighted things turned out the way
they did. I am a
Debian/GNU/Linux evangelist, but I am
willing to help with any
distribution. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 07:33 PM EDT |
> From all we can see, SCO has no rights to anything in Linux, but if SCO's
own expert is running Linux as a server, why shouldn't you?
According to SCO, people don't need to stop running Linux, rather they need to
pay SCO for a SCO IP license, $699 or whatever.
For example: From
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml;jsessionid=LHUEFU3Z
XT51CQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleId=18831088&_requestid=200724
VARBusiness: At the end of the day are you guys going to do to Linux what was
done to Napster?
McBride: Our goal is not to blow up Linux. People ask why we don't go after the
distributors...'If you have such a strong case, why not shut down Red Hat?' Our
belief is that SCO has great opportunity in the future to let Linux keep going,
not to put it on its back but for us to get a transaction fee every time it's
sold. That's really our goal.
So maybe Mr Rochkind has a SCO IP license - either one he paid for - or one SCO
gave him?
Quatermass
IANAL IMHO etc[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 07:48 PM EDT |
Do a search on www.netcraft.com and here's what you'll find:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.sco.com
and here:
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.sco.com
yes.... Linux/Apache! What's up with that?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 02 2006 @ 08:02 PM EDT |
| Good old stats_for_all. Link [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: sproggit on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 03:14 AM EDT |
The admission by Mr Rochkind that he uses ubuntu Linux as a server is, granted,
mildly interesting, but at the end of the day it is not going to have anything
more than a minimal impact on the possible outcome of the legal dispute.
IBM _may_ be able to use it to illustrate to a jury that even The SCO Group's
very own experts are using this software; they may even have an opportunity to
question Mr Rochkind himself upon the existence or validity of his license, but
that's about it.
A far more interesting inference that we can draw from this is that someone who
clearly has a good grasp of unix fundamentals chooses to run a linux
distribution as a server in a mixed computing environment; and that he is
sufficiently confident of it's ability to "just keep going" that he
fronts it with a KVM switch-box that is usually connected to a Windoze [sic]
machine.
So let's put this piece of news - interesting though it is - behind us, and
focus on the task at hand.
We have to remember that expert witnesses aren't selected in the same way as
jury members. It's permissable for an expert witness to have a level of
knowledge that in a juror could be argued to be prejudicial to one or other
party in the case.
Far better for us to review all the publicly available testimony that Mr
Rochkind has given and try and determine if there are any errors or ommissions
in there that would be helpful to IBM's Legal Team, then post them back here...[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Speculation - Authored by: Alan(UK) on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 03:37 AM EDT
- Speculation - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 04:15 AM EDT
- Speculation - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 06:26 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 09:40 AM EDT |
From Marc's blob...
But yesterday the KVM was switched to Ubuntu,
and I had FireFox running, full screen.
After a while my daughter
called me over to see something, and I said, "Oh... you're on Linux! Didn't you
notice?"
She replied, "Well, some things looked different, but I
thought it was Windows."
Ubuntu Linux has passed the Turing Test!
Strikes me funny that this so called 'expert' claims Linux
passes the Turing Test when his daughter never even interacted with the GUI
interface to Linux, just Firefox. Sounds more like good testimonial for
Firefox's cross platform capabilities to me.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: DannyB on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 10:28 AM EDT |
I have a hypothetical question.
Suppose in a hypothetical litigation, the plaintiff's expert witness were to
come forward and state that the plaintiff has misrepresented or even altered the
expert's written opinion?
What would happen?
Now, suppose that such a revelation occured upon the witness stand at trial?
Q. Mr. Expert, in your written expert opinion, at page 2857, paragrah 4, did you
state that "...therefore the earth is flat.".
A. No. I never said that. I have here a copy of my expert opinion, and on page
2857 it does not say that.
What if the plaintiff says that they can't explain the discrepancy and they need
a significant extension "we need moooreee tiiiiiiimme."
---
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: jrvalverde on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 10:43 AM EDT |
Dear PJ,
regarding Coherent and other clones. I thought I had submitted this long ago,
but here it is anyway: in the '80s there were a good number of
"clones", some well known, like MINIX or XINU, others never took off
their creator's home like OMU (One Man UNIX), some of them were commercial, like
COHERENT, and many were free or almost, for both big and small computers.
BTW, COHERENT (and its source code) was released to the public some years ago.
It may be got from
- ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/coherent/
- ftp.mayn.de/pub/coherent/
both installable and in source code.
MINIX and XINU are well known.
OMU's site is
- http://tallyho.bc.nu/~steve/omu.html
written originally for the 6809 it was ported later to the 68000 and got
real-time support.
UZI was a UNIX for the Zilog Z80 microcomputers, it's still
available from
- http://www.dougbraun.com/uzi.html
it was later ported to other Zilog processors and is still ultimately being
ported to the MSX microcomputers. All in binary and source code form.
openBLT (now deceased and only available through the Wayback machine) was
another clone that reached almost maturity.
Thix is also deceased and only available in the Wayback Machine, it is a kernel
written in the '90s
- www.hulubei.net/tudor/
Trix, written in the 80's was meant to be at some point the kernel for GNU,
developed at MIT it wasn't completed and is still available from Bitsavers
- www.bitsavers.org/MIT/trix
Tunix, another clone, available from
- ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/tunix
Yoctix, same, from
- www.mdstud.chalmers.se/%7Emd1gavan/yoctix/
Sprite was another free derivative written from scratch introducing many of the
methods and concepts later used in most modern operating systems. Things like
log-structured file systems (like JFS) were described with source code included.
So much for methods-and-concepts. :-)
And of course, what everybody knows, UNIX until System-III is publicly available
from TUHS and other sites, released by Caldera themselves
- www.tuhs.org
TUHS is a great resource: what many don't know (and was recently announced) is
that there was a detailed comment to the first versions of UNIX, with source
code included, and I'm not talking of Lion's. It's a lot earlier and of
similarly high quality, dealing with the original assembly versions. The
commentary and sources are available on bitsavers as well in the bellabs
directory
- http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bellLabs/unix
Many of these are of little interest as they deal with early UNIX definitions
(predating System V) and tend to be dead, which may explain why SCO wouldn't
bother to pursue them in the first place (little money to ripe), but show as
well how many of the methods-and-concepts were out there, being copied and
reimplemented, and how many came from other sources, and how well-know they have
been for decades.
Regarding origins, since a very large part of UNIX System V was produced by Sun,
this takes an interesting side issue: Sun offered free Solaris source code with
version 8. No, it didn't make it Open Source, but it was released for anyone
interested under a non-redistribution license for free, implying that
methods-and-concepts to their whole system V implementation were available for
anyone to study and learn although source code could not be reused.
Now, Solaris 8 wasn't that different from Solaris 2.6 which is a lot earlier
(and therefore closer to original System V). And since a huge part of System V
came from Sun, that info has been available with source for anyone to study for
years now.
Add to it that Solaris 10+ is now open source (and not that much different from
its ancestors) and let SCO say they own methods-and-concepts to what secret
methods?
---
Jose R. Valverde
EMBnet/CNB[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: vadim on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 11:29 AM EDT |
I wonder that may be it will be equitable if we (meaning PJ) should contact
Marc itself and get him participate in the discussion...
Vadim
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 11:44 AM EDT |
| SCO is down 25% today? Why? The ruling was Wednesday. Is there new news? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 03 2006 @ 02:18 PM EDT |
Rochkind isn't testifying that Linux is not an excellent OS, just that it's
benefited from SCO's alleged IP.
That's no reason for him not to use it while the case is still being decided.
He may be greatly misguided (or misguidedly greedy) but at least he shows good
taste in his own choice of server OS.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: abraxus on Tuesday, July 04 2006 @ 02:59 PM EDT |
It seems a notable thing here that I don't see mentioned very strongly is that
SCO has provided an "expert" who in his own words and on his own blog
has publicly stated that Linux is interchangeable with a windows system and the
useability is esentially invisible even to a child. How much more endorsement
for an OS could one want but to be recommended by the "expert"
representing the largest threat to the success of Linux that has surfaced YET.
If there is any other company in the background supporting SCO in this fiasco we
should thank them for having provided expert public "testimony" that
Linux is ready for the desktop and easy for "non-experts" to use. I
finally Got The Facts.[ Reply to This | # ]
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