Amusements from the SCO Group's latest filing

54. At this point in time, IBM's UNIX expertise was centered on its own Power PC processor. IBM had little or no expertise on Intel processors.

Mmm. I guess David Boies is hoping that the judge is so technically ilinformed that he will never have heard of that obscure phrase "IBM PC". And he'd really better hope than noone mentions that OS/2 is fully SMP capable on Intel processors...

97. The only way that the pathway is an "eight-lane highway" for Linux to achieve the scalability, SMP support, fail-over capabilities and reliability of UNIX is by the improper extraction, use, and dissemination of the proprietary and confidential UNIX source code, derivative works and methods. Indeed, UNIX was able to achieve its status as the premiere operating system only after decades of hard work, beginning with the finest computer scientists at AT&T Bell Laboratories, plaintiff's predecessor in interest

I also seem to remember that BeOS was SMP capable - in fact it was widely acclaimed as better SMP than Windows and lower thread latencies than all mainstream operating systems. BeOS was developed by a small number of developers in under four years, and then ported to PowerPC in under 2 years, and ported to Intel in a similar amount of time. It puts SCO, Microsoft and Apple's development efforts somewhat into perspective!


It also seems that the JFS code complaints come from the /ref/ directory of the JFS distribution - which just happens to be to original OS/2 implementation of JFS included for reference, from which both the Linux and AIX JFS modules were written. So even if SCO's insane definition of derivative works is upheld - this example probably doesn't even fall under it!

People have been getting excited that the filing lists files and line numbers. But basically they are just giving references to the entire blocks of code implementing RCU, NUMA and JFS in Linux - which they have already claimed using words, so they are basically presenting the same information in a different way to make it look like they are complying with the court order to put up or shut up.

And then this:

80. The first versions of Linux evolved through bits and pieces of various contributions by numerous software developers using single or dual processor computers. Unlike IBM, virtually none of these software developers and hobbyists had access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities for Linux development. Without access to such equipment, facilities and knowledge of sophisticated development methods learned in many years of UNIX development it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the Linux development community to create a grade of Linux adequate for enterprise use.

What a load of garbage! Even the poverty pack PCs used by Linus et al in those days would have been more powerful than the 68000 based machines Sun used to develop SunOS on (although with much smaller screens - gee I loved those monochrome screens!). And about the only way to get more sophisticated than a single PC is to use a second for serial-based kernal debugging (Ooh - thinking of that makes me long for the good old days of MacsBug ;) A commenter on Groklaw also points to the very early MCC Linux distribution from the University of Manchester, who UK tax payers would hope had access to enterprise-scale equipment...

What a load of crap!