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| "System V Application Binary Interface" published with the permission of USL in 1995 |
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Friday, August 25 2006 @ 11:51 AM EDT
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SCO would like to redepose Otis Wilson, and they will. No doubt they are hoping to undermine his prior testimony on AT&T/USL policies on methods and concepts. However, we've found a document dating from 1995 that supports Mr. Wilson's, and IBM's, position. We find our old friend errno.h in this paper too, along with all its cousins, publicly on display, and here's the kicker: the copyright page says it was published with the permission of USL.
The paper, SYSTEM V APPLICATION BINARY INTERFACE, PowerPC Processor Supplement, by
Steve Zucker of Sun and Kari Karhi of IBM, interestingly enough, was published in September of 1995, Part No: 802-3334-10 Revision A, with an earlier 1993 IBM copyright. The website's description of the document goes like this: This document describes the PowerPC Application Binary Interface for SVR4 Unix. It details parameter passing conventions, the OS interface,
object file format, debugging format... etc. Unfortunately, it seems
that the pages are in a backwards order... so the first page is page
150, the 150th page is page 1. Well, well, indeed it do, as they say. (Update: Here's a version [PDF] in the right order.) So we have a document that precedes IBM's contributions to Linux by a mile that is pertinent to both the PowerPC processor and the SVR4 ABI internals with detailed ABI information that even has a Sun part number, publicly available since at least 1995. And here's the copyright page's wording: © 1995 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
[address]
© 1995 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.
[address]
This specification includes material copyrighted by UNIX System Laboratories, Inc., which is reproduced with permission. What does it all mean? I asked Dr. Stupid to explain it all to me. Also SCO might like to know, so its lawyers don't torment Mr. Wilson with questions that this paper does away with. Earth to SCO: USL let the dogs out in the mid-90s.
Here's what Dr. Stupid explained to me about this paper: This is the detailed processor-specific supplement for UNIX (i.e.
System V) on PowerPC chips. As mentioned previously, including by SCO itself, the System V ABI
has two parts: a common part (the "gABI") and the part that is
slightly different for each processor architecture. This document is
the latter.
Now, it is important to note, he pointed out to me, that oldSCO, Santa Cruz Operation, dealt in UNIX on Intel x86
chips, for which there was a separate document, which Groklaw published already. So there might be information given in the x86 document that
isn't given in this (PowerPC) one. That said, the differences in
information would not be differences in copyrightable code, but in
low-level "agreed ways of doing things" such as what registers to use
(e.g. look at page 3-14 in the PowerPC document), information that I believe
would fall under trade secret protection, if anything. However, as you can see, both the x86 and PowerPC supplements were openly
published, and even that assumes that the "way of doing things" was
devised by USL -- they may have been devised or
co-devised by the chip manufacturers (e.g. Intel and Motorola). Now, if
it is a given that the objective of publishing these specs was to define
"this is how you do a System V ABI," then wouldn't you, by definition, end up
with only one way of doing something, with the result that the merger doctrine kicks in
even for those small bits of source code (header files) that are in
the ABI documents?
Note that errno.h appears again on page 6-11 - our friend sure gets around.
Possibly the most significant point about the whole document is that
USL granted permission for this material to be openly published. It
shows clearly that at the time, USL was not interested in
keeping this material secret. And of course, any material USL
published (or allowed to be published) would then presumably no longer be covered
by any non-disclosure clauses in UNIX licensee's contracts. IBM's contract specifically freed them from any secrecy requirements if material was made public by anyone other than IBM. I thought it'd be nice to have this handy before the deposition, knowing that SCO reads Groklaw religiously, with the hope that poor Mr. Wilson will not have to be toasted and roasted over the fire at least regarding materials publicly revealed so long ago in this document, made public with the express permission of USL to IBM itself in 1995, and from the copyright page some portion at least by 1993. I'd call it a methods and concepts doomsday document.
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| Authored by: feldegast on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:15 PM EDT |
So they can be fixed
---
IANAL
The above post is ©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: kberrien on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:19 PM EDT |
The summary judgement evidence keeps getting bigger and bigger! Not to mention
a few more pages in a hopeful PJ book![ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: MathFox on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:23 PM EDT |
Your other legal and open source issues. Please provide a short summary of the
article with your link.
---
If an axiomatic system can be proven to be consistent and complete from within
itself, then it is inconsistent.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:43 PM EDT |
errno.h et. al. should also appear in the processor specific supplements for
other cpu architectures too (e.g. Motorola 68000 and Motorola 88000) which
almost certainly have publication dates even earlier than 1995.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:44 PM EDT |
The facts in this whole case never seemed to matter to SCO, and I doubt this
discovery will change anything they or their lawyers do.
On the other hand, it may very well help IBM in their efforts toward PSJs.
There are a lot of people in the community who know how things have been done
and the balance between intellectual property protection and openness that has
evolved. It is just that nobody has had to create a body of admissible evidence
to prove it, but that has changed. Perhaps the slowness of these proceedings
has had a benefit indeed, just look at what has been discovered by the community
and the strength of the body of evidence that has been dug up over this time.
Peter
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:45 PM EDT |
The PDF document is obviously encripted to keep this vital IP away from the eyes
of people who do not own a printer and the unwashed.
I wonder if printing the document in reverse order circumvents the copyrights?
:)[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:47 PM EDT |
| JR in WV [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:54 PM EDT |
PJ,
Pardon a stupid question, but with discovery "over" and this
presumabily wasn't uncovered in discovery, would this paper be admissible at
trial? Or can evidence not identified during discovery be used?
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Stumbles on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 12:57 PM EDT |
| As PJ says, I'd call it a methods and concepts doomsday
document.
Mr. Love had many reasons why he told McBride it was a fools
errand. This
document in view is the shinning example. ---
You can tuna piano but you
can't tune a fish. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: BsAtHome on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 01:07 PM EDT |
| As I wrote her
e, SCO is distributing the ABI still today at http://www.sco.com/developers/dev
specs/. They have been doing so for quite a while.
---
SCOop of the
day [ Reply to This | # ]
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- SCO Copyright... - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 03:31 PM EDT
- SCO Copyright... - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 06:37 PM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 01:22 PM EDT |
The authors claim that they had USL's permission to publish its copyrighted
work. That's just a claim and just because they assert it doesn't mean it's
true. There has to be a piece of paper giving them permission to publish the
stuff. Yes/no? That one should be the real killer shouldn't it?
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 01:34 PM EDT |
I mean, why not just have a little contest...
somone find the OLDEST (or earliest) copy of errno.h ever published with
permission and post it here?
I'm sure someone can find one going back to the 70s or even earlier.
Unix has been around a looong.... time...[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: fredex on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 01:40 PM EDT |
While this is one more piece of straw on SCO's back, and is therefore a valuable
document to know about, it is surely not the earliest example of this
information being public.
For example, there were several clones of Unix around prior to that, some of
them more faithful than others. One example is Coherent with which I am
personally familar, and which was first released, I recall, in the early-to-mid
1980s.
There's a story (it may even be liniked to from one of the pages here on
Groklaw) of Dennis richie (or was it Ken Thompson, I can't remember for sure)
being sent to Chicago by his employer (AT&T) to visit the offices of the
Mark Williams Company to review their Coherent and report back as to whether he
thought it violated any of AT&T's copyrights. The story goes that he did
visit them and did conclude that it did not so violate. This story appears (or
at least used to appear) on the Dennis/Ken's (whichever it was) web site in the
not-far-distant past.
You can't build a decent clone of Unix without knowing much of the info in these
documents. The fact that it was possible to port many Unix programs to Coherent
(with varying degrees of painlessness) implies that they stuck fairly close to
the API and ABI. Therefore, the information was already known.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Chris Lingard on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 02:37 PM EDT |
USL published them, old SCO published them, and Caldera published them.
Here is a page from Intel
that gives this useful
informatiom:
The "System V ABI" is a fairly large
document that devotes a rather small section to calling conventions used by Unix
systems on various platforms. Specifically it covers these in the psABI
(processor specific ABI) documents, wheras processor independent stuff is found
in the GABI (general ABI) document. The current psABI for 32-bit x86 platforms
can be found here, among other
places:
stage.caldera.com/developer/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf
Ther
e are also downloadable psABI document on the web for PPC, MIPS, SPARC, and
x86-64. I figure it might not be politically correct to list pointers to these
in this Intel forum, but there is always Google
:-)
This no longer links, but Intel itself show that
this information was public from USL, through old SCO. until Caldera.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 04:40 PM EDT |
In light of new evidence recently uncovered by the SCO legal team, SCO has
decided to withdraw, without prejudice, any and all accusations, insinuations
that might have been made in the last 5 years.
Our only reminder to those
individuals who may freely choose to pirate copywrite works is don't buy
Lamborginies and Humvies
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 04:47 PM EDT |
I thought it'd be nice to have this handy before the deposition, knowing
that SCO reads Groklaw religiously, with the hope that poor Mr. Wilson will
not have to be toasted and roasted over the fire at least regarding materials
publicly revealed so long ago in this document...
Yeah, so they can
spend more time on his personal life. Thanks a lot PJ ;-)[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 06:37 PM EDT |
Hi,
I can't help but feel that Wilson got himself into more than he wanted. Did he
have to be a witness? Does the law do anything to compensate him for his time?
It just seems a burden for a person not attatched to either party to have to be
a witness. He helped once now gets stuck into doing another deposition. Whats
in the law to help the people who are being a witness? What if Wilson didn't
have a lawyer to even try to squash the deposition in NC? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 07:18 PM EDT |
I really want Mr Rochkind on the stand so I can hear how he filtered all his
supposidly copied information through all this publically released information.
It should be a very interesting story.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: mram on Friday, August 25 2006 @ 08:02 PM EDT |
SCO -- here's an idea...sue USL..
Even better, change your name to Caldera again and sue SCO
(no you are not paying attention - not the old SCO - the new SCO). The new SCO
in turn can sue old SCO. Old SCO turns around and sues Caldera.
What, you may ask will be achieved by all this? For one you can have your sweet
revenge on long haired smellies and other creatures visiting Groklaw. You can
make their brains explode just thinking about all possibilities....at the
minimum you can make all groklawers bald (even the long haired ones).
And what do you have to loose? MS will keep footing the bill as long as all
these cases mention linux in some way or the other.
Actually this whole scheming started [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: leopardi on Saturday, August 26 2006 @ 12:02 AM EDT |
| See
the document at the ATLAS
web
site. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: IMANAL on Saturday, August 26 2006 @ 02:07 AM EDT |
Searching for "Application Binary Interface" on Amazon.com gives you
the following eight brothers:
1. System V Application Binary Interface: Motorala 88000 Processor Supplement by
AT & T (Paperback - May 1990)
2. System V Application Binary Interface: Intel386 Processor Supplement by AT
& T (Paperback - May 1990)
3. System V Application Binary Interface (Standards) by UNIX System Laboratories
(Paperback - Dec 1993)
4. System V Application Binary Interface Intel 386 Architecture Processor
Supplement by System Unix (Paperback - Jan 1994)
5. System V Application Binary Interface Sparc Processor Supplement by UNIX
(Paperback - Mar 1, 1994)
6. Unix System V: Application Binary Interface : Intel I860 Processor Supplement
by AT & T (Paperback - Jun 1991)
7. Unix System V: Application Binary Interface Motorola 68000 Processor
Supplement by AT & T (Paperback - Aug 1990)
8. System V Application Binary Interface: Sparc Processor Supplement by AT &
T (Paperback - May 1990)
Indeed, there was a long tradition of _both_ AT&T and UNIX System
Laboratories to publish the interface, years before IBM entered the picture.
-
---
--------------------------
IM Absolutely Not A Lawyer[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 26 2006 @ 02:44 AM EDT |
This gets IBM off the hook for disclosure, since it was already public.
However publishing the infomation does not negate the copyrights. So IBM may be
clear of disclosure, but since this was published under copyright, I don't see
Linux getting a clear right to use from this.
Dennis H
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 26 2006 @ 06:18 AM EDT |
I guess they will ask him about his (ex)-wives anyway.
Of course, it might be helpful making him less important in case they manage to
discredit him.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Bill The Cat on Saturday, August 26 2006 @ 11:08 AM EDT |
I was porting BSD to SYS 5.0 in 1985 using UniSoft's package on a Heurikon
Motorola 68010 Multi-Bus platform. I purchased the "Reconfiguration
Rights" for the UniSoft System-V package and the Heurikon elements to do
the porting. Among the tasks were writing device drivers, porting system calls
(BSD ones into Sys-V) and eventually had a platform that would compile (Green
Hills C compiler) and run BSD applications on the UniSoft SYS-V Unix on the
Heurikon.
Heurikon provided the Unix 68000/68010 documentation with the computer system.
The task was completed in 1986.
I required and had the errno.h, system call headers and many other files
necessary to do this task. I also had the BSD equivalents. So, they were
published prior to 1990 and running on systems other than AT&T or
SCO/Caldera/Novell/... much earlier.
I also had the AT&T System-V Interface Definition books (Vol 1 and 2) and a
lot of other documents to enable me to do this task.
So, you really can't say this stuff just surfaced.
---
Bill Catz[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: sproggit on Sunday, August 27 2006 @ 04:12 AM EDT |
...the more convinced I am that this is misdirection on a massive scale.
In truth, I'd half exected this case to go quiet until we got to the PSJ phase;
then, if anything survived that milestone [a big 'if', granted] for there to be
another lull until the trial next year.
What we've seen instead is a steady stream of activity [perhaps made possible by
the schedule of filing redacted documents and other court submissions]. Groklaw
has been able, through PJs careful guidance, to unearth a veritable treasure
trove of information relating to ABIs, to include files, etc.
Yet I have this nagging doubt that what we're seeing at the moment [from the
court, at least] could easily amount to misdirection on SCOs part. By now they
will know that Groklaw is an exceptionally capable, well-resourced and
knowledgeable force. If I were David Boies, I would now have adapted my legal
strategy to do everything in my power to neutralise Groklaw. How?
The most obvious would be through a simple red herring. Drop a tiny clue into a
filing somewhere - a clue that talks about errno.h, or ABIs or something -
knowing that PJ, with her legendary diligence, would find it, bring it to us,
then work with us to dig out the truth. It's a dangerous gambit, for each time
it's done, SCO run the risk of our finding something even more damaging to their
case. But I wonder if they consider this to be a risk worth taking, in order to
throw the massed might of Groklaw off the scent???
So, if this were true, what could we do about it? What other aspects, issues, or
dimensions to this case have we not turned our interest?
This is just wild speculation on my part, but two of the most interesting for me
would be the release of methods and concepts and "negative knowledge".
Let's take a moment to consider each.
Methods and Concepts
We've seen lots of discussion that suggests that you cannot divulge methods and
concepts unless those M&Cs appear in the Linux code base. Thinking that
through, I'm not so sure. How about this?
Suppose that I am an IBM developer working on the Linux project, but that my
background is either Dynix/PTX or AIX. I'm watching the kernel mailing list and
see someone post a question that relates to, say, RCU. The question is something
along the lines of "Could we make it do this...?" From my experience
of AIX, I know of a better way to make this part of RCU work, so I decide on a
post of my own. I might start with something like, "If I recall my AIX
correctly, it did something like this..." or similar. Now, I am not
releasing code of any kind, but if I offer a design suggestion and make
reference to AIX, SVR4, Dynix/PTX or any other piece of source I've worked on,
could I be accused of revealing a method or concept? Could this be what SCO are
accusing IBM employees of doing?
Negative Knowledge
When I saw this listd for the very first time, I had to smile. This almost
certainly has to be mailing list material and for a reason similar to that I've
given above. Consider the scenario in which someone posts to a mailing list,
"Couldn't we write system X to work like Y?" and, as an IBM programmer
with relevant experience, I might post back, "You could, but it's a bad
idea... AIX does that, and although you can get X to work OK, performance of Z
will die as a result..." So in this case I'm not revealing a method or
concept, but I am showing how not to do something by revealing my knowledge of
performance issues within SVR4 or AIX or Dynix/PTX.
Now, before SCO can prevail in a court of law with accusations like this, they
are going to need the mother of all ladder theories... all tenuously held
together with the magical "Methods and Concepts" argument. I'm really
not sure where the law stands with this. The legal test for M&Cs is, in my
mind, inextricably linked with the "obviousness" test for patents,
particularly [as I tried to show in an earlier posting relating to NUMA/SMP
code] how the low level software in many of these cases can easily be driven by
the functioning of the hardware that code supports.
But assuming all of this is theoretically possible, is there anything that we
can do?
Well, just maybe, if we're willing to run the risk of a fairly wild goose chase.
The kinds of disclosure's I'm talking about here would take place in email
discussion forums and would have been made by employees of IBM programmers, or
employees of Sequent, etc.
So if there is anyone out there who could :-
1. Locate and access all the kernel mailing list archives.
2. Write a script or program to search for meaningful pattern matches such as
"ibm.com" or "AIX" or "Dynix" etc
3. Start up a thread here and post links to their findings.
maybe we can start to at least identify some of the accusations that SCO might
be making...
WORD OF WARNING
If we are able to do this, I think we should be exceptionally careful about
putting unverified posts back here... at least until they have been properly
researched. It would be all too easy for a data match to lead people to the
wrong conclusions.
So anyway, the above suggestion might be a complete diversion, but I would
humbly submit that we should try and avoid being "led by the nose" and
following every scrap of information that falls from SCOs table. Some of that
might drop naturally, by now I imagine a lot of it is being thrown.
Just a thought...[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, August 28 2006 @ 01:49 PM EDT |
| very nice, geezer. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, August 28 2006 @ 02:02 PM EDT |
very nice, geezer.
- another ( anonymous ) math geezer[ Reply to This | # ]
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