Anonymous Reader writes “SCO may now have filed for UNIX copyrights and made various allegations about code-copying, but the actual complaint against IBM still seems to be focused around allegations UNIX-based enterprise technologies (such as RCU, JFS and SMP) being improperly added to Linux. Yet, reviewing the Linux kernel archives reveals some interesting and surprising background on just who helped put these technologies into Linux.
PJ’s GROKLAW blog has uncovered that
“Caldera [former name of SCO] Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor” including what looks like
a lot of work on the early stages of JFS.
The same employee’s name also crops up when we look at RCU. When
IBM posts RCU improvements, did he complain? No, he requests further improvements even helpfully providing a link to inspire the IBMer!
Lastly, definitely worth reading, Alan Cox on Linux SMP. He says that got he ideas
from a book (which presumably can’t be somebody’s trade secret), invented his own implementation, and did this using hardware provided by Caldera (SCO themselves do acknowledge providing hardware to the Linux SMP team).”
Category:
- Linux
