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On August 18 at their trade show in Las Vegas, SCO showed code that they claim was copied into Linux in violation of their copyright or trade secrets. The German publisher Heise photographed two slides of SCO's code show and made them public on their news ticker. Heise publishes c't, a popular German computer magazine. These are the slides:
This slide has some of the "System V" source code comments, and shows their
correspondence to very similar comments in Linux. Some of the System V
comments are deliberately obfuscated using Greek characters in a Symbol font. You can remove the obfuscation by typing in the Greek text and changing back
to a Latin font. The result is:
* As part of the kernel evolution toward modular naming, the * functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. * Compatibility will be maintained by the following assembly code: * (Also see mfree/rmfree below)This comment appears above the function shown in the next slide. It's entertaining that the SCO folks had no clue that the font-change could be so easily un-done. I'm glad they don't work on my computer security :-)
This slide has several C syntax errors and would never compile. So, it doesn't
quite represent any source code in Linux. But we've found the malloc()
function this slide refers to. It is included
in code copyrighed by AT&T and twice released under the BSD license: once
by Unix Systems Labs (AT&T), and again by Caldera, the company that now calls
itself SCO. Some of the released versions include the comment in the first
slide. The Linux developers have a legal right to make use of the code
under that license. No violation of SCO's copyright or trade secrets is
taking place.
The function was written by Dennis M. Ritchie or Ken Thompson at AT&T, in 1973. It appears in both "dmr" and "ken" directories, in different versions. You can see the function in this file, originally called dmr/malloc.c. The code is from Unix version 3, the oldest known version of Unix that still exists in machine-readable form. The complete source for that system can be found here on the net. In 2002, Caldera released this code as Open Source, under this license. Caldera is, of course, the company that now calls itself SCO. The license very clearly permits the Linux developers to use the code in question. Historical information on why Caldera released the Unix source code to the public is here, and contains some information relevant to the SCO court cases.
The malloc() code also appears in Lions Commentary on Unix 6th Edition. Lions' book was first published in 1977 under non-disclosure terms, and was used as a textbook by universities that had licensed the Unix source. AT&T vended a copy of this book to Unix licensees for some time, and a photocopy version was widely circulated among Unix licensees. The Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarantella), before its sale of UNIX to Caldera (now SCO), allowed the book to be published without non-disclosure terms in 1996.
Another version of the algorithm was published in Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language, Prentice Hall 1978, apparently without restrictions.
Another version of the code is copyrighted by the University of California as part of the BSD Unix system that they produced for the U.S. Army and released as Open Source. That code is also under the BSD license, and appears here in this file released in 1984. It is likely that this is the version that found its way into code contributed by graphics manufacturer SGI into Linux. It's interesting to consider how this code came to belong to the University.
In the early 1990s, AT&T's Unix Systems Labs (USL) sued BSDI, a company vending the BSD system, and the University of California, over this and other code in the BSD system. The claims that SCO is making are very similar to the AT&T claims. AT&T lost. It was found that AT&T had copied heavily from the university without attribution, and thus AT&T settled the case. In the settlement, the University agreed to add an AT&T copyright notice to some files and continue to distribute them under the BSD license. AT&T agreed to pay the University's court costs. Some details of the lawsuit are here.
The AT&T code that was subject of this lawsuit survives into SCO's current system. SCO's "pattern analysis team" found this code and correctly concluded that it was similar to code in Linux. But they didn't take the additional step of checking whether or not the code had been released for others to copy legally.
Actually, you don't need a "pattern-analysis team" - you can just type lines of the allegedly copied program text into google.com, and google will show you some of the places where that code has been posted to the net.
It strikes me that SCO would show their best example. This is it?!?!? Hoary old code from 1973 that's been all over the net for three decades and is released under a license that allows the Linux developers to use it with impunity? If this is their best example, they are bound to lose.
SCO's response to this document is It's his word against ours. I'm not, however, asking you to rely on my word. I've presented you with links to the evidence, all of which is available at web sites not under my control. I've never asked you for a non-disclosure agreement. I haven't changed any of my information into unreadable fonts. It would be nice if SCO would operate that way, too.
I'm told that the code in question has already been removed from the most recent development versions of the Linux kernel, for technical reasons.
My sources in this analysis are some very helpful members of the Linux community who posted information on the Linux Weekly News web site, and on this page of very useful information on the SCO cases.