Gary L.
12-23-2003, 01:15 PM
An interesting story in the New York Times today on the SCO lawsuit.
It appears that SCO sent letters to a bunch of Linux users making the
usual claims about copyright violations and demanding royalty
payments. This letter contained a list of some of the files alleged to
be copyrighted by SCO and distributed in various Linux distributions.
The article states:
Begin quote.
Mr. Torvalds began looking at these files, and their history,
yesterday. As a student in Finland, he wrote the original kernel of
the Linux operating system in 1991. Mr. Torvalds, who now lives in
Silicon Valley, has since continued to oversee the growth of the Linux
project, which relies on contributions from a worldwide network of
programmers.
"Some of these files were written by me directly," Mr. Torvalds said
in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux
project by third parties, including I.B.M., which is being sued by
SCO.
The files listed in SCO's letter are written in the C programming
language. Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h,"
Mr. Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are
actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux" in
September 1991.
"I wrote them," Mr. Torvalds noted, "and looking at the original ones
I'm a bit ashamed."
He observed that some of the macros, or programming shortcuts, are "so
horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't
because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)" - ending his comment
with the e-mail symbol for winking and smiling.
Mr. Torvalds's talent as a communicator, including his
self-deprecating humor, is one reason for the remarkable progress of
the Linux project.
But Mr. Torvalds is also clearly angered by SCO's accusation that much
of Linux was merely copied. "In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the
files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say
that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no
copying from any Unix code, ever.
End quote.
The full article can be found here. Note that you have to be a
resistered user to get access to the nytimes web site, but it is free
and you can use a bogus e-mail address to register:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/technology/23linux.html
- -
Gary L.
Reply to the Newsgroup for the benefit of all
It appears that SCO sent letters to a bunch of Linux users making the
usual claims about copyright violations and demanding royalty
payments. This letter contained a list of some of the files alleged to
be copyrighted by SCO and distributed in various Linux distributions.
The article states:
Begin quote.
Mr. Torvalds began looking at these files, and their history,
yesterday. As a student in Finland, he wrote the original kernel of
the Linux operating system in 1991. Mr. Torvalds, who now lives in
Silicon Valley, has since continued to oversee the growth of the Linux
project, which relies on contributions from a worldwide network of
programmers.
"Some of these files were written by me directly," Mr. Torvalds said
in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux
project by third parties, including I.B.M., which is being sued by
SCO.
The files listed in SCO's letter are written in the C programming
language. Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h,"
Mr. Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are
actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux" in
September 1991.
"I wrote them," Mr. Torvalds noted, "and looking at the original ones
I'm a bit ashamed."
He observed that some of the macros, or programming shortcuts, are "so
horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't
because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)" - ending his comment
with the e-mail symbol for winking and smiling.
Mr. Torvalds's talent as a communicator, including his
self-deprecating humor, is one reason for the remarkable progress of
the Linux project.
But Mr. Torvalds is also clearly angered by SCO's accusation that much
of Linux was merely copied. "In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the
files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say
that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no
copying from any Unix code, ever.
End quote.
The full article can be found here. Note that you have to be a
resistered user to get access to the nytimes web site, but it is free
and you can use a bogus e-mail address to register:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/technology/23linux.html
- -
Gary L.
Reply to the Newsgroup for the benefit of all