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In all fairness to him Chris Sontag has moved on and is now working for a different company. It is not in his interest to lie in order to maintain a unified front for SCO against Novell, IBM and RedHat. Attempting to do so now would only risk getting nailed as a criminal perpetrator, co-conspirator or accessory. His testimony rings true to me since he was a PR guy and not a real techno-type. He is no longer part of the fraud ; trying to help them now would no doubt endanger his present job unless he needs to display some misplaced sense of loyalty in order to stay with his current employer. That will be Darl's only functional future resume highlight: I'm not afraid to lie when it's needed by the company!

Darl has to continue to try to maintain the facade that SCO acted reasonably and responsibly and that this is all just a big mistake on the part of those counter-suing and/or making Lanham Act claims against SCO. But once the [counterclaim] prosecution lawyer got him to assert that what he put in the SEC filings was true then what he is saying now about licensing fees, the meaning of the licensing agreements and the relative values of SysVrX and Unixware of code must be false.

And only copying someone's ideas to make something similar, or exactly the same, is *not* the same as copying copyrighted works

Thus Darl is a moron if he believes this is why Linux is wrong.

> And only copying someone's ideas to make something similar, or exactly the same

Linux implement POSIX. Linux does not copy Unix.
It's like Firefox implementing HTML. Firefox is not copying IE, It's just implementing HTML.

Ouch...IE innovative?

Correction: only one company was innovative enough to buy another company's code and rename it Internet Explorer.

Wasn't Mozilla a spin off of Netscape or something like that?

Sadly IE, until version 8, hasn't done very well (from a technical point of view) at making a really good quality browser that supports generally accepted standards laid out by the W3C. Of course that hasn't hurt it's ability to dominate the market, but it's made designing a compliant website a lot hard. Thanks for the innovation Microsoft. We could've done it without you.

No. You have the wrong idea here.

"Copying" in a legal sense (ie in order to violate copyright) requires that there be a direct copy of the lines of code. There are no lines of code from Mosaic in Netscape. There are probably no lines of code left from Netscape in Firefox.

Just because two things perform the same function does not mean they are copies of one another.

Is a diesel engine the same as a gas turbine engine (aka a jet engine)? No? Is either one the same as a petrol engine? No? Are they copies of one another ... of course not. Yet all three of these different engine types burn hydrocarbon fuels and produce rotary motion.

Edited 2008-05-01 23:53 UTC

Actually, Firfox *is* Netscape, at least it's based on Netscape's source code.

IE *is* Mosaic "Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign." (From IE6 About... box), although IE7 apparently no longer contains any Mosaic code, it is still highly likely to have design/structure features inherited from Mosaic.

Netscape did copy Mosaic to an extent, but Mosaic was far from the first graphic web browser (WorldWideWeb, ViolaWWW and Erwise all pre-dated it).

Well HTML is free, try to implement e.g. H264 and sell the product. Tadaaaa, so it has nothing to do if you implement something, but if it's free to use!

Linux mostly implements POSIX.

Welcome to reality, copy something of the behaviour of Apples beloved OS and they will sue you until the end of the world

That isn't copyright infringement (unless you copied their logo and/or artwork directly) - that's trademark and/or patent infringement.

These are completely different topics. It's unfortunate that people get those mixed up so much.

edit: added clarification on logo/artwork

Edited 2008-05-01 23:25 UTC

Apple's beloved OS isn't a public standard.

POSIX is a public standard.

And then reality answers back that Apple already sued Microsoft and lost.

And only copying someone's ideas to make something similar, or exactly the same, is *not* the same as copying copyrighted works Thus Darl is a moron if he believes this is why Linux is wrong. "

Linux isn't wrong ... in exactly the same way that any collaboration isn't wrong.

If we didn't have collaborative works ... there would be no innternational telephone network. There would be no shipping. There would be no international flights.

There would be no food industry, no agriculture. There would be no industry at all, in fact, without collaboration and working interfaces between the efforts of separate parties.

Collaboration ... in the sense of many parties working together to make separate small pieces work well together to form a wider system ... is an essential engineering process. Without it, our species would revert to living in caves.



Exactly so. Linux is a collaborative work of many parties ... it is an operating system that implements the POSIX standards.

There is nothing at all "wrong" with that in any way at all ... despite the greed and delusions of some corporate money-grubbing types.

linux is a *reimplementation* of unix. freebsd is closer to a copy of an actual unix.

It's not common knowledge because it isn't.
Linux is a unix-like OS that conforms, to various degrees, with the POSIX standards.

UNIX is a family of similar operating systems and a trademark not an implementation. A set of specifications and tradition defines what UNIX is, not the origin of its source code.

To say that Linux is a copy of UNIX makes no sence. You could say that Linux is an implementation of UNIX or that Linux is a copy of SYSV.

Linux is not certified as a UNIX implementation but there is no theoretical reason to stop a Linux vendor to get a UNIX certification.

Never. Like you didn't know that.

If I had to take a WAG, he probably considers BSD to be a less easy target with less deep pockets.

I do wonder what he thinks about BSD too

Do you remember the trial between AT&T and BSDI back in the nineties? Well it's important, the clarified it out of court. And guess why? Because there is (was) lots of BSD code in UNIX

http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html

"The second example says nothing about Linux, since it's obviously not SCO code. It does, however, suggest that SCO is abusing the BSD license"

http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.html

If you have a single clue about the heritage of BSD you wouldn't ask such a silly question.

well, they'd have the same Look and Feel (c/tm) ^_^

ok, I'm going to hell for that one.

He's a good argument against cloning isn't he.

When it gains traction and they can make an example out of them.

That's why they have standards as to how code can get into their system. For example, there was a really big audit of their code recently - shut down work on the project for a while to my understanding - to help prevent Microsoft from being able to make any claims as such (patents, etc. aside) like SCO is trying (and failing) with Linux.

it says "Application Anywhere"

http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/testdrive/windows-server-...

System Check
Checking for the javascript support
This site requires JavaScript to be enabled.

Checking for IE6.0 or higher
This site requires IE6.0 or above.

Checking for the ActiveX control to be installed

"Application Anywhere" fails to run oh cant be anywhere then can it...

It was already old five years ago.

SCO said to IBM: "Linux is a copy of UNIX".

IBM said: "Show us where".

SCO said: "No, we won't. Give us money".

... at that point, all of five years ago, we already knew that there is no UNIX code in linux.

POSIX is a standard, UNIX is a trademark

But in order you call your product by the trademarked name "UNIX", you must implement the Single UNIX Specification (currently version 3). So, to split hairs, I am referring to the Single UNIX Specification. Woohoo!

Sigh!

Linux is not a copy of AIX, and Linux is not a copy of SCO Openserver, and Linux is not a copy of any UNIX.

Linux is a new codebase, built from the ground up. It is a mostly-compliant implementation of the POSIX standard.

Just like the situation where, even though both Fords and Hondas have petrol-driven engines, a Honda engine is not a copy of a Ford engine, so too is Linux NOT a copy of any other POSIX compliant OS.

Period.

Get this word "copy" right out of your head.

Linux is an mostly-complete re-implementation of the POSIX standard, written by collaboration over the Internet (mostly via mailing lists) starting from the efforts of Linus Torvalds in about 1990.

Edited 2008-05-03 00:55 UTC

Well, you are wrong in your argument. BSD, SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX were all forked from the Unix Time Sharing System at one time or another. They probably do not contain much of that old code if any at all but most recent direct descendant is Novell UnixWare from 2004.

It's explained here, along with some other interesting history regarding Darl McBride that I did not know before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride