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| James Bond on a Mission to Sell and a Note About the Levenez v. SCO Unix History |
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Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 02:18 AM EDT
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I do wonder sometimes what will become of my synapses after I spend so many months trying to figure out the way McBride and his band of merry men think. Translating SCOSpeak can't be neuronally healthy.
But while I still am in command of my senses, I couldn't help but notice something curious in the news coverage of SCOForum today. Could SCO's Chris Sontag be telling fibs? Heavens to Betsy, surely that can't be it. Maybe he's so new, he doesn't know his company's history? Or maybe James has to tell a few fibs when he's on a "Misson: Trained to Sell", the theme of SCO Forum. Here's part of what Sontag said today: Turning to derivative works that have found their way into Linux, Sontag said these include NUMA (non uniform memory access), Read Copyright Update (RCU), Journal File System and schedulers. "A number of entities have violated their contracts and contributed inappropriate code to Linux. That's how Linux has advanced so quickly and found its way into the enterprise so soon," Sontag said."We have an improbable Linux development process. The current 2.5 kernel contains features and functionality that took years and years to be developed in Unix. With Linux we've seen it develop from a baby to a race car driver in three or four years," he said. I believe we can assume that when he said "Read Copyright Update", it was a Freudian slip, their business strategy du jour -- those rascals just never stop thinking business, so it's bound to spill over into their speech -- and what he meant to say was Read Copy Update. Or possibly another mainstream journalist has had his brain snatched and turned into cabbage, and now the poor thing just writes whatever SCO speaks, without questioning it. But, hey, what does precision matter on such a vital mission?Let's take a trip back in time, to a simpler, gentler Caldera just about a year ago. Computerwire ran a story on June 13, 2002, and if you compare what was said today with what they wrote, your brain might explode trying to make them match up. Both stories can't be true, because they seem to be mutually exclusive. For those of you with a sub to Computerwire, here's where you can get it the whole article, "Caldera Backs Away From 64-Bit Open Unix". For the rest, here are relevant snips: Caldera International Inc has maintained its commitment to the Unix operating systems it acquired from Santa Cruz Operation Inc, despite admitting that it currently has no plans to port Open Unix to Intel Corp's 64-bit Itanium processor.With development of the company's Linux distribution more or less handed over to SuSE Linux AG and the UnitedLinux project, Caldera's research and development dollars are now focused on its Open Unix and OpenServer Unix flavors and the Volution management products, but while both Unix variants continue to be developed by the company, neither are likely to be available for 64-bit processors. As the legacy Unix variant, OpenServer was never likely to be ported to Itanium, but sizable investment has gone in to projects to develop a 64-bit version of Open Unix, both with IBM on the Monterey project and through SCO's Gemini project that created UnixWare 7, the predecessor to the current Open Unix 8. Feedback from Intel and customers, however, has led Caldera to the conclusion that there is enough life in the 32-bit market. "The feedback from Intel and our customers is that 64-bit addressing today just isn't a priority, and the 32-bit processors are just getting better and better," said Caldera's VP EMEA, Chris Flynn. "32-bit is good enough for most people's processing requirements." That appears to suggest that Open Unix and OpenServer's lifespan will last only as long as 32-bit processors continue to sell, but Flynn maintained that the operating systems will remain available as long as customers want them. "There's plenty of mileage in 32-bit Unix," he said. "Until our customers tell us that they don't want Unix and they don't want 32-bit Intel any more, which I don't see happening, then nothing's going to change. 32-bit is just great for customers over the next few years, but we do have
choices, and we could move forward with our 64-bit projects." One of those choices will be 64-bit Linux, which is being developed through the IA-64 Linux Project, and will be available from Caldera. Flynn believes that by the time users are looking to purchase 64-bit servers and operating systems in volume, Linux will have gained the robustness and scalability it requires to compete with Unix in the enterprise market. Another option Caldera has on the shelf is IBM's AIX 5L, which was developed from the Monterey project between IBM and SCO. In 2001, Caldera offered a preview of the AIX 5L operating system for Itanium to developers, and it remains a possibility that Caldera will offer IBM's Unix for 64-bit users should there be the demand.
If you look at this chart, you'll see that System V is later called OpenUnix, in case you like visuals. I worry my brain is starting to look like that chart, or worse, from trying to parse out all the SCOstories. Now, I'm not a programmer, so it's certainly possible my brain is just missing something -- heaven only knows I laughed myself silly today reading all about the anti-GPL strategy our worthy opponents have concocted -- but I simply can't harmonize what was said today with this article from June of 2002. Then again, I'm not Trained to Sell, and so far, my brain hasn't been turned into cabbage, so maybe that explains how come I notice disparities and think they matter.
Update:
Speaking of disparities, here's SCO's version of that chart, thanks to Wayback and Darl McBride who posted it on darlmcbride.com, prior to the world discovering the disparities and SCO removing the chart from its website. Oridinally, SCO had
hosted the darlmcbride materials as a subdirectory of sco.com, as you can see by the robots.txt page on Wayback, and then they were moved to his own site, apparently around January 22, 2005. The materials hosted on sco.com/darlmcbride.html are blocked; the materials on his own site, www.darlmcbride.com, are not. Had Groklaw not pointed out the disparities, and verifying them with Eric Levenez himself, who authored the original chart, perhaps SCO's version of it might have ended up used in court as an exhibit to "prove" SCO's story. Note the cunning credit line at the bottom of SCO's chart, which they added after it was pointed out that the copyright information was not on SCO's chart:
Original UNIX history chart created by Eric Levenez. Copyright © 1996-2003, Eric Levenez. January 2, 2003. Used with permission. That gives you no clue that SCO had altered the chart, does it? So I doubt they would have clued in the jury either. If you are curious, here's a change SCO made, showing a solid green line as if Linux was a direct offshoot of Minix, which it was not. SCO added the part about dotted lines meaning influence, or what they titled "SCO Linux Heritage", solid meaning "SCO Linux Pedigree" by which they seemed to mean source code. There is, however, no Minix code in Linux. Linus used Minix to write Linux, sort of like you might use Microsoft Word to write a letter, and there'd be no Word code in your letter. It would only be the prop used to get your letter done.
Levenez's chart, in contrast, says this about solid lines: Note 1 : an arrow indicates an inheritance like a compatibility, it is not only a matter of source code.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 04:34 AM EDT |
| "heaven only knows I laughed myself silly today reading all about the anti-GPL
strategy our worthy opponents have concocted "
The irony is that SCO calls itself the defender of IP in the Internet age but
when IBM points out that they are violating their IP to the code they put in
Linux the first thing they did was not to try and respect that IP but to destroy
it. That should tell us just how much they respect other's IP.
Julien Rousseau[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 06:10 AM EDT |
| I've just read all of August. Bloody good summery. Your have been added to my
list of favorites.
Remove fruit to email
Charles Esson[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 06:46 AM EDT |
| "We have rocket scientists who have applied their spectral recognition and
pattern analysis to software, which has yielded amazing results. We have
found needles in the Mount Everest-sized haystack," Sontag said.
They only found "needles" ?
Are these the same rocket scientists who program Ariane guidance systems ?
I ran a spectral and pattern analysis on the non validly licensed (their words)
kernel 2.4.13 source code downloaded on 8/13/2003 from:
f
tp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Server/current/SRPMS/
and compared it with the validly licensed (under the GPL) www.kernel.org's
source and
found a 100% correllation of infringement for every line of code.
My highly sophisticated spectral and pattern matching software (grep, KCalc,
diff)
must be light years advanced over just "rocket science".
Sontag should be ashamed to settle for just "needles" in haystack.
gumout[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 07:45 AM EDT |
| Huh, whuh?
"We have an improbable Linux development process. The current 2.5 kernel
contains features and functionality that took years and years to be developed in
Unix. With Linux we've seen it develop from a baby to a race car driver in three
or four years,' he said."
Since when does it take "three or four years" to *BLATANTLY COPY" 29 files. Or
even 1 million lines of code. I decided to try my own test: I copied an ENTIRE
Linux 2.4.18 source tree. Now, this is on one of my SCSI-based machines, so
your mileage may vary, but the result? Just a little under 4 1/2 minutes.
Looks like they just VALIDATED the entire open source philosophy - a "few"
programmers were able to do in three or four years, what SCO hasn't been able to
do in almost 20. Is it a surprise? Maybe they were spending all that time
making false claims about their contributions to Linux, or their business
acumen, or their knowledge of contracts?
Has anybody asked them when they're going to stop lying?
Keep up the great work: for a paralegal, you're doing a far better job of
reporting than any of the trade journals I've seen lately. Accurate,
entertaining. The addition of your mix of comments and support links, and the
results are impressively clear. SCO must simply HATE you! Hey, ya better watch
out - it's already clear they don't give a hoot about contract law, so maybe
they'll figure it's OK to start putting out contracts on critics.
"But your honor, they wrote 10 lines about us! Others created derivatives
totalling over 1 million lines. If they had kept going, they would have used
every word in the book to describe us, and we intend to protect our rights to
the entire English language! Besides, we don't like the law, they were
violating our rights, so we just had them taken out."
JD
John[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 07:57 AM EDT |
| Gee,
It only took Ken Thompson a week to write the original Operating system,
a week to write the original shell, a week to write to write an editor,
and a week to write an assembler.
One month in the summer of 1969, and Unix came to be...
D.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 08:18 AM EDT |
| It took Linus three months to get a self-hosting system from scratch. But Ken
had significantly more experience :)
If you can build upon a lot of design knowledge it is easy to catch up with
decades of evolution in a few years. Especially if BSD source code is available.
What is significant in Linux is that development didn't stop when a standard
level of UNIX compliance was reached. Improvements to the kernel are still being
made, even on the aspects where Linux is currently leading the pack.
MathFox[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 19 2003 @ 10:00 AM EDT |
| So very true.
One of the things about Linus' kernel project is that it similar levels of user
involvement and passion as the original Bell Labs project did.
Of course, are points are similar. It does not take a competent person very long
to build a useful system.
D.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 22 2003 @ 06:17 PM EDT |
| Your rcomment on SCO's attempt at new modern software.
"Hmm. SOAP means Windows, does it not? Why, yes it does. The plot thickens. Now
if they can just slow down the Linux juggernaut and keep it off 64-bit long
enough to get that kernel written"
I disagree,
SCO is attempting to completly steal the Linux kernel, to use as "their" "new"
Unixware.
Linux code WAS copied into the LKP by SCO, SCO did not want to GPL SCO Unixware,
but want to use GPL'ed code
to enhance their product.
Next they will "embrace extend and extort" SAMBA.
SCO motto: If you can't Innovate, Litigate.
nm[ Reply to This | # ]
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