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| Where Was Ms. DiDio On This Day of Days? |
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Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 04:04 AM EDT
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I can't help myself. We've all listened to her expound on this code for months now. Hardly a day went by without another quotation from the lovely and tireless Ms. DiDio on how credible SCO's code claims are and how seriously the community should be taking them. And today, not a peep. Well, we can't have a DiDio-free day on the one occasion we all particularly want to hear from her the most. Since she does not oblige, and is perhaps wanting to hide behind the couch so no one ringing the bell will know she's home, perhaps a quick review. After all, she's a senior analyst, so her words have lasting value. In a perfect world, her boss reads Groklaw. So here, on this supremely satisfying day, for your reading pleasure and for the edification of all, I will let her speak, in her own words: - Laura DiDio, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, said she was shown two or three samples of the allegedly copied Linux code, and it appeared to her that the sections were a "copy and paste" match of the SCO Unix code that she was shown in comparison.
DiDio and the other analysts were able to view the code only under a nondisclosure agreement, so she couldn't divulge intricate details of what she was shown. "The courts are going to ultimately have to prove this, but based on what I'm seeing ... I think there is a basis that SCO has a credible case," DiDio said. "This is not a nuisance case." - "One could argue that developers could write exact or very similar code, but the developers' comments in the code are basically your DNA, or fingerprints, for a particular piece of source code," said Laura DiDio, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group (Boston), who viewed the evidence.
- "My impression is that [SCO's claim] is credible," says Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group analyst who was shown the evidence by SCO Group earlier this week. "It appears to be the same" code. But DiDio says the developing battle could hinge on legal fine points that are hard to sort out in the current atmosphere of claims, denials, and counterclaims.
Apparently the most telling evidence is that parts of the SCO code and Linux code include identical annotations made by developers when they wrote the programs, says DiDio, who compares such notes to the signature or fingerprint of a developer's work. "The fact that these appear to be transposed from Unix System V into Linux I find to be very damaging." DiDio says she was shown several instances where the source code and developer's comments in one operating system were the same as in the other operating system. - Some lines of code in Linux are the same as those in Unix, which SCO controls, even down to the wording in explanatory comments made by the programmers, according to Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio, who reviewed samples.
While different versions of so-called executable code can be very similar, "comment lines are like fingerprints," said DiDio, who added that she believes SCO could make a credible case against IBM.
And my personal favorite, although off-topic: Securing copyrights adds a measure of credence to SCO's claims, says Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio. "They are striking the right note of righteousness and responsibility." And the first runner-up: "SCO won't be stupid about the pricing. They won't gouge customers," said Laura DiDio, senior analyst, application infrastructure and software platforms, at the Yankee Group. Enough. The hole she dug for herself is deep enough. I don't want to humiliate anyone. She is a fellow human, after all, and humans make mistakes. But her mistaken ideas, expressed with conviction, did damage to GNU/Linux, and she is probably better suited to talking about Windows, her previous area of ...I started to say expertise, but who knows? There is always a danger in listening to only one side of a story. When you are an analyst, I'd say it's professional suicide. At least it ought to be. Now that the rug has been pulled out from under her, and her conclusions have gone splat, I'd like to see her say she was wrong. Ok, it's not a perfect world yet, so I won't hold my breath. She's really a metaphor anyway to make a serious point. There was plenty of information out there she and other analysts, and reporters too, for that matter, could have been considering, but didn't, that would have shown them they were barking up the wrong tree. Literally. And now, how do they look? Not you, Bill Claybrook. You were an honest man who knew enough about programming to ask the right questions and express the right doubts. Finally, I think this Babelfish translation of the Heise article pretty much says it all, when it talks about McBride's message to the faithful at SCOForum: "Matured technology is not to be had evenly to the zero tariff. 'free software -- that is not our thing." Into Unix were 20 years development: With this basis SCO wants to make also in the next 20 years money. It called developers and partners from the Unix surrounding field for support, because "otherwise the times of the good business will soon past be." Here's hoping.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 02:11 AM EDT |
I think Ms DiDio's name is now destined to become a not just a metaphor, but a
verb in it's own right. Just like people say something is 'borked' referring
back to Robert Bork. In the future I think we will be see things be labeled as
being 'DiDioed'. I for one can't wait.
nexex[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 02:14 AM EDT |
Maybe some spectral analysis could show that Ms DiDio is a SCO spokeperson
clone?
Ph(i)Nk 0[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 02:45 AM EDT |
| I think Ms DiDio's name is now destined to become a not just a metaphor, but
a verb in it's own right. Just like people say something is 'borked' referring
back to Robert Bork. In the future I think we will be see things be labeled as
being 'DiDioed'.
Didioed is quite nice compared to what some people are calling her. More than a
few are referring to her as "Didiot" etc.
Unfortunatedly she was apparently just out of her league and got conned by a
slide show. Pity she continued to dig a deeper hole for herself, though.
monkymind[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 03:09 AM EDT |
| Had Laura Didiot any experience at all with programming, she would have grasped
that comments are totally non-functional. She shows her ignorance like
see-through underwear when she describes these comments as the "DNA" of the
code. And since she is quite verbal, she shows that ignorance to the world.
I doubt that she has much of a future to look forward to as an analyst. She shot
her own credibility as a professional analyst to crap by her own hand -
repeatedly. And the Yankee Group will offer her up as a sacrificial lamb once
they realize that that their credibility, i.e. survival, as a business hangs on
getting rid of her - OK, instead of "sacrificial lamb" I should have used
"expendable black sheep" because the phrase "sacrificial lamb" involves a
connotation of innocence and virginity that is not applicable in her case.
blacklight[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 03:39 AM EDT |
| Laura DiDio made some professional mistakes. There's no reason to put all the
blame on her, as she is heavily misguided by the SCO clan. There are dozens of
comparable blak sheep in the herd of analysts.
Don't forget that SCO started the show.
MathFox[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 03:41 AM EDT |
| I dug up her email address and sent her a short message about her comments and
giving her a link to Bruce's analysis. I received the following avidently
automated reply.
"I will be out of the office starting 08/18/2003 and will not return until
09/03/2003.
I will respond to your message when I return."
Hopefully she will be keeping up with events as she travels and will find
that page herself (doubtful).
At least I tried.
Glenn
Glenn Thigpen[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 04:08 AM EDT |
| MathFox, I disagree
If you look at how Claybrook handled it, it's a world of difference
Claybrook asked SCO if they had proof IBM was involved. They said no. Later they
told him they mis-spoke. It was in the press reports of his account.
- For DiDio, I have yet to see any reports of similar questions
Claybrook questioned SCO whether there could be some common origin, or prove the
direction of copying. And seems to have subsequently gone slight further about
this being an open issue.
- For DiDio, I have yet to see any reports of similar questions. She just went
out and said it was proof
Claybrook didn't say anything nasty about IBM or Novell, without even being
aware of the Novell letters about not terminating AIX
- For DiDio, I have yet to see any reports of similar comments. She did say some
things about IBM, and some ugly things about Novell and their CEO
Claybrook didn't (at least publicly) make any comments suggesting Linux users
are drug crazied hippies
- DiDio did
Claybrook didn't (at least publicly) suggest companies ought to approach SCO for
a license
- I think (not certain) DiDio did
Claybrook didn't make irrelevant comments about the copyright registration,
Sequent license thing, etc.
- DiDio did
I'm sorry, but in my opinion, DiDio has stuck her foot in her mouth, not once,
but many times.
If you are supposed to a pundit, I would expect, you not to do that, not to do
that repeatedly, and to ask some basic (I was going to say probing, but the
question about direction of copying and IBM involvement is not even probing,
just basic) questions.
However, if you are a pundit, in my opinion, if you do make a mistake or
mis-analyze or forget to ask key questions - it shows you in a much better light
- if you are prepared to come clean and put out corrections. So, in my view,
that would be the best course for DiDio.
I'm prepared to accept that people are not perfect, so if she does that, I would
not hold her past comments against her.
quatermass[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 04:23 AM EDT |
If only we could see her admit "maybe just maybe i was wrong"
yesterday was just such a satisfying day.
br3n
brenda banks[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 04:32 AM EDT |
| quatermass: DiDio made enough mistakes to lose her professional credibility.
Let's refrain from attacking her personally.
Let's all enjoy her holydays!
MathFox[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:04 AM EDT |
| MathFox, yes I'd agree with refraining from personal attacks
However what I was trying to point out, is that if there is a blame due, it
pertains to her so-called professional analysis. A retraction of some of her
comments would undo much of the damage.
quatermass[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:06 AM EDT |
| I like to add to the collection:
"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all
you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a
capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or
ashram," she said in a phone interview from her home in Massachusetts. "Because
if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"
http://w
ww.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/08/18/sco_ibm/index1.html
Cause that's just hilarious!
eloj[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:38 AM EDT |
Yeah, I really think we all ought to chip in for a Hookah and send it to her.
;)
Paul Krause[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 08:14 AM EDT |
| > DiDio made some professional mistakes. There's no reason to put all the blame
on her
I don't think anyone is suggesting that she be "blamed" for anything. However,
speaking as one who has in the past purchased expensive services of the sort Ms.
DiDio renders (from Gartner, IDC, and others), and having also purchased Yankee
Group studies of various market segments, I would say this:
No one forced Ms. DiDio to try to make a name for herself and her employer by
getting out in front on this. She made a bet, and she lost. As someone here
noted, her name is now mud and the term "DiDio" will forever be associated with
"gullible analyst who can't see past the vendor BS." Seeing past the vendor BS
is precisely what people pay companies like Yankee Group to do. We can hear any
company's line of BS -- for free -- by calling up their salesman and inviting
him to come over and pitch us. We don't need Yankee Group and their $300-an-hour
"analysts" for that.
This woman zigged left when she should have zagged right, and in the process
destroyed her career as an analyst. That's not an attack on her personally, it
is simply a fact of life. Perhaps ZDNet will hire her to write puff pieces on
Microsoft offerings. But as an 'analyst' whose opinions IT people will pay money
to get, she is tarnished goods. Yankee Group should cut the cord now and hope
people forget about her because her name is radioactive.
Bob[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 09:09 AM EDT |
I think she acted in an irresponsible manner. Since she is not an expert in
programing
or the history of Unix, she should have consulted with some experts before
rendering a professional opinion. If she had, she would have known to ask hard
questions like Claybrook. Asan analyst you have a professional responsibilty to
be clear on when you do not know enough in an area and need to speak with those
who do. Also, I think it is not an accident that she is a Microsoft partisan.
It seems pretty clear that her support for Microsoft greatly biased her
opinion.
david l.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 09:25 AM EDT |
| We are all biased, that's human nature. The New York Times has a liberal bias.
The Wall Street Journal has a conservative bias. But neither lets their bias
compromise their reporting of the facts. That's why both these newspapers are
credible.
I am biased in favor of Open Source. But I am certainly open minded about the
technical merits of Windows. It's one thing to be a M$ partisan. It's another to
be ignorant and to stay consistently ignorant.
blacklight[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 10:52 AM EDT |
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Had Laura Didiot any experience at all with programming, she would have grasped
that comments are totally non-functional. She shows her ignorance like
see-through underwear when she describes these comments as the "DNA" of the
code.
I actually think the DNA analogy is remarkably good. DNA is composed of
functional and non-functional portions. If a functional portion mutates, the
resulting organism is likely not to survive; if a non-functional portion
mutates, the resulting organism is usually not affected. Thus, when tracing how
closely two organisms are related, the non-functional portions of the DNA are at
least as useful, if not more useful, than the functional portions.
If two pieces of code both contained the chunk "for (i = 0; i < SIZE; i++)
table[i] = 0;", I would not consider this as conclusive evidence that they were
related. I would consider a few sentences worth of identical comments to be
much better evidence.
Carl Witty[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 11:29 AM EDT |
| If you ever get access to my programs, feel free to copy the comments therein to
your heart's content. That won't do you much good, though: the only parts of any
program that matter are those that contain executable code. Since you are aware
of the fact that DNA contains both functional and non-functional parts, you
probably know more about DNA than Laura Didiot does. On the other hand, if there
is one kind of programmer that I hate, it's the kind that changes code without
bothering to change the associated comments.
So far, the analysis of the comments shows that the code came from BSD. Keeping
the comments unchanged is probably a good and deliberately way to show that the
code had not been altered from BSD. I fail to see how the fact that same BSD
code is also in SCO-scum's UNIX give SCO-scum any right to claim that this code
is theirs and no one else has the right to use it. For SCO-scum to make such a
claim with a straight face is tantamount to stealing BSD's IP.
blacklight[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 01:56 PM EDT |
| Let me try again.
I believe that Laura DiDio probably does know that comments are non-functional.
As I said above, I think this makes them better than code for deciding whether
copying took place. I also believe that comments have better protection under
copyright law than code does (copyright does not protect functional aspects of a
work).
If Laura saw code that looked like the code from atealloc (in http://cvs.xwt.org/linux/arch/ia64/sn/io/ate_utils.c?r
ev=1.1.1.1&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup) and code that looked like
malloc (in htt
p://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/32VKern/usr/src/sys/sys/malloc.c.html) and
judged on the basis of comments and code that copying took place, I believe she
was correct to do so. I believe she would have been correct to do so even if
she had seen only the code, or only the comments. In this context, I don't
believe that analogies between the comments and DNA, or fingerprints, are
inappropriate.
I don't understand why blacklight is criticizing Laura for this DNA comment when
there are so many other, more valid reasons for criticism (such as not trying to
verify what was copied to what, whether the copying was legal, and whether IBM
was involved in this copying).
Carl Witty[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 02:51 PM EDT |
| Carl wrote "I would consider a few sentences worth of identical comments to be
much better evidence."
Totally wrong! As a programmer, I can tell you that comments often have little
or nothing to do with comparing code. The comments shown were function
descriptions. As such they are of NO USE AT ALL in proving code is
identical.
"Clean" reverse engineering allows for the use of function descriptions as long
as they are publicly available. Since the code in question was publicly
available in a number of forms (books, public internet pages, free
distributions), they are fair game for people doing reverse coding. A programmer
doing reverse coding is legally allowed to use public function descriptions as
well as psuedo-code derived from the actual code by a separate team of coders.
All this was settled by the courts decades ago over the reverse engineering of
Apple ROMs and PC BIOS ROMs.
J.F.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 04:31 PM EDT |
| Who said anything about the code being identical? I meant evidence that copying
took place. If the comments were identical, that means that the comments were
copied, so copying took place.
I agree that it would be legal for somebody to use the function description
comments from old malloc.c as part of an effort to create an independent
allocator implementation. However, that doesn't mean it's then OK to copy the
function descriptions you started from into your finished code. Those comments
are themselves copyrightable, and I don't see why copying the comments would be
any less illegal than copying the source code. (Well, I guess I can see reasons
why copying the comments MIGHT be better than copying the source code, based on
fair use; but nothing that would say that copying the comments is always OK.)
Carl
Witty[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:12 PM EDT |
| Well I don't think copying the comments is a good thing - unless they are public
domain or BSD'd. In this case, they may well be one or both.
As copying them if they're not, I think this is part of the BSD case too. You
need to look it up and confirm exactly what the judge said, but I pretty sure
that there's definitely something in there about the comments being a
non-functional aspect of the code and some level of duplication (at least) not
being infringement.
quatermass[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:35 PM EDT |
b.s! Comments have zero functionality, and anyone can copy my comments to their
heart's content. If I saw my comments in someone else's program, I would not
jump to any conclusion that that someone simply copied the entire code off me -
Hell, I might even think it's a compliment on my ability to write comments! (In
my time, I was one of the top five programmers in the Comp Sci Dept of my
engineering grad school. Hey, when you're good, you're good!) The only thing
that would tick me off is reading a comment such as "Author: blacklight" in
someone else's program, and that program is a piece of crap. Comments may be
copyrighteable, but their functional value is a big, fat zero! And what is the
economic damage to me when someone copies my comments? Another big, fat zero!
style="height: 2px; width: 20%; margin-left: 0px; margin-right:
auto;">blacklight[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:47 PM EDT |
| It seems to me that blacklight may never have had to maintain decade old code
without the benefit of comments. I do so on a daily basis. It's no fun.
Functional value of zero? Indeed.
Dave Walker[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 05:51 PM EDT |
| It seems obvious to me that her face saving response will be something along the
lines of either "You freaks think you have the upper hand, but that's not what
they showed me" or "Under the terms of the NDA, I can't verify whether or not
that's the code they showed me." In so many words.
I also saw a reference on Slashdot today to an article wherein she claims she
only orally agreed to abide by the NDA in the first place, but I can't find the
URL now.
raindog[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 06:05 PM EDT |
| I feel for you, Dave: spaghetti code, no comments, unintelligible comments,
off-the-mark and off-the-wall comments, misleading comments, comments that
haven't been updated in ages and all. Did I miss anything? However, within the
context of executable code, comments have zero functionality.
One is my personal favorites is different variables with the sam exact meaning
within the same area of code and the same variable (with different meanings, of
course) used within the same area of code. We all get to pick our poison.
blacklight[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 08:22 PM EDT |
| I rarely comment my code on the old basis: if it was hard to write, it should be
harder to read, and near impossible to change. :^}
This was a must in the old days of coding - it gave a coder job security. I'm
better about it these days with anything I do that is open source.
As I understood it from people involved in the reverse engineering business,
function descriptions were "fair use" as long as the were just a description,
not a flow chart or psuedo-code, and were publicly available.
I knew one of the guys from Central Point Software who made the first legal
Apple 2 clone. This was his job for a number of years.
J.F.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 20 2003 @ 08:54 PM EDT |
It's not only Didio that should be held accountable - the Yankee Group should
explain whether they are 'analysts' or are now a stealth Public Relations firm.
This whole thing stinks of PR - a lot of red herrings, planted 'news' etc.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
Tim Ransom[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 21 2003 @ 04:57 AM EDT |
| J.F. Sorry to have to rain on your parade, but Linus Torvalds reportedly used
Bach's "The Design of the Unix Operating System" as one of his inspirations to
write Linux, and it does have the major Unix algorithms in pseudocode.
Pseudocode is one of those things - a way of describing an algorithm so that any
reasonably competent programmer can make use of it. If it is treated as "real
code", it's lost its value.
Wesley Parish[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 24 2003 @ 04:45 PM EDT |
| Analysts remained divided over the latest developments in the widening Linux
ownership dispute. Lauro DiDio of the Yankee Group was particularly at odds with
characterizations by Red Hat and others of SCO's claims as an assault on the
open source movement's collaborative development model.
"I'm all for open source, and competition serves everyone's interest. But if
Linux is really to take its place alongside Windows . . . then the vendors in
this space cannot act like a bunch of hippies in a '60s commune or ashram," she
said. "There really is no such thing as a free lunch."
http://www.slt
rib.com/2003/Aug/08062003/business/81616.asp
quatermass - SCO delenda est[ Reply to This | # ]
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