SCO
and
Linux News
SCO
and Its Investors Rearrange The Chairs
SCO Files More Requests
With Court In IBM Case
Alexis
de Touqueville Institution Claims Linus Didn’t Write Linux
SCO
and Its Investors Rearrange The Chairs
After
what appears to have been a tempest in a teapot (but it’s hard for
outsiders to tell), SCO Group appears to have settled its
differences with investor BayStar Capital II by repurchasing and
retiring all of the Series A-1 Convertible Preferred Stock that was
created to take in a $50 million investment from BayStar and Royal
Bank of Toronto.
(Royal
Bank, who we understood came into the deal on BayStar’s advice,
had already sold $20 million of their $30 million share of the
investment to BayStar.)
SCO
is paying BayStar $13 million in cash and 2,105,263 shares of common
stock. Assuming BayStar
made Royal Bank whole and looking at the current price of SCO Group
stock (about $5 per share), BayStar is still counting on SCO being
very successful in its lawsuit against IBM.
As part of the deal, BayStar has given up a number of
privileges, including their right to veto SCO deals.
Maybe they’ve decided an arms length relationship with SCO
will be better?
SCO
Files More Requests With Court In IBM Case
In
the meantime the legal case continues, with SCO continuing (in an 18
page brief filed with the court, which you can see at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200406030127048
(whether you choose to read the more than 100 comments is up to you
and your schedule), to claim that they need more.
More code. More
information about the code. More
information about the people who wrote the code.
Actually,
some of the comments were quite insightful, pointing out that SCO
might be giving up on the “infringement” part (because they
could prove or not prove that with what they already have) and
looking for a “derivative” claim that will stretch that notion
pretty far.
I
think we’ll need to wait for the judge to see what happens next.
Alexis
de Tocqueville Institution
Claims Linus Didn’t Write Linux
Ken
Brown of the de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) has written a 92-
page report that claims that Linus Torvalds didn’t (and
couldn’t) have written Linux from scratch.
Welcome
to the world of topsy-turvy. (If you’re a Gilbert and Sullivan
fan, you’ll recognize that as meaning a place where everything is
turned upside down). Brown
starts off by trying to make the case that software licensed under
the GPL is NOT Open Source but something he calls “hybrid open
source” and bad. Good
Open Source is Apache (which is distributed under its own Apache
License – similar to the GPL but somewhat less restrictive.
In case you think this isn’t the way the rest of the world
thinks about Open Source, you’re right.
In the non-AdTI world, hybrid software might be Open Source
software like MySQL, which can be acquired under a pure GPL Open
Source license or under a commercial license (which permits its
proprietary modification).
Given
this strange beginning, you may not be surprised that the report
methodology is a bit strange, too. For example:
-
In a report about whether Linus Torvalds wrote Linux, Brown
never made any attempt (as best anyone can tell) to interview Linus.
You’d think he would have liked to ask him some questions.
-
A number of statements Brown makes in the report have been
disclaimed or questioned by the principals involved.
For example, Brown claims that Linux is actually a rewrite of
Minix, a version of UNIX created by a Dutch university professor,
Andrew Tannenbaum, for teaching purposes. Brown went to Amsterdam and interviewed Tannenbaum.
Tannenbaum says he never told Brown any such thing and that
Linus’ use of Minix as his operating system is scarcely the same
thing as copying the code. In
fact, Tannenbaum does an excellent job of reviewing Brown and the
subject of writing UNIX and operating systems.
You can read his comments here. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/
. You might want to
read the second note, linked at the bottom of that page, too. His
conclusion (he’s an expert on operating systems) is that Brown
doesn’t know anything about UNIX or Linux.
-
Brown also claimed to have interviewed UNIX inventor Dennis
Ritchie. Interviewed
turns out to be a rather strong term for what actually occurred, as
Ritchie explains in Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040601212559558).
Actually, what happened was that Brown exchanged a single
email with Ritchie, in which Brown asked questions that tried to get
Ritchie to say that Linus didn’t write Linux or that he or
AT&T was “angry” about Linux.
Ritchie simply gave him the facts which, of course, are quite
different than that.
-
One of the “scientific” arguments Brown uses is to cite
Brooks and The Mythical Man Month, a famous software document which,
in essence, claims that programming doesn’t scale very well.
That is, what an expert programmer can do in one year (which
is generally the amount of time it takes somewhat very smart and
working full blast to do something interesting, like write WordStar
or 1-2-3) can’t be done by 12 programmers each working one month.
It fact, it will take longer.
Much longer.
Brown
(who must not know much about how programmers work) creates a little
chart where he tries to compare how long it took Ritchie’s team to
write UNIX and Tannenbaum’s to write MINIX and then shows it would
clearly be impossible for Linus to have written Linux in 6 months.
I’ve known a number of exceptional programmers in my career
and you cannot measure them against ordinary humans at all.
First of all, they have a vision and a passion to get the
work done. Secondly,
they have the necessary skills. I once challenged one of these extraordinary fellows by
telling him that it took at least two years to write a word
processor. (It usually takes a team working in a commercial
environment more like three.) He
called me six weeks later and invited me over to look at what he had
done – not just a very nice word processor, but most of the
elements of a circa 1985 office automation system!
Another extraordinary programmer I know wrote an entire word
processor – alone – in less than a year, including its chameleon
interface that allowed it to look like any of the then available
commercial products; we sold it to a hardware vendor for over
$2,000,000. Each of
those programs, of course, was much larger than an operating system
kernel.
(Tannenbaum,
by the way, points out that it didn’t take him several man years
to write MINIX since he wasn’t just writing the operating system,
but it’s entire environment, and the book from which it would be
taught, a much larger job. Also,
he was doing the whole job part-time, working only at night.)
What
comes across loud and clear is that Brown and AdTI had an agenda.
That agenda seems to have been
-
To discredit Linus by claiming he didn’t invent Linux but
rather copied it from various sources.
(As Ritchie points out, nearly every operating system,
including UNIX, is based on the lessons learned from the
construction and use of the operating systems that went before.
(I wonder if IBM should use that quote in the SCO case?
Right out of the lion’s mouth, so to speak.)
-
To discredit the whole idea of Open Source as it exists
today. If you suspect
AdTI must have had a hidden client for this agenda, Brown disclaims
this notion.
What
is most interesting about this so-called research report is watching
the Open Source community, from the UNIX pioneers to the Linux
“newcomers,” carefully document the truth as they know it and
offer it forth as an antidote to the misunderstandings and
misinformation they see in the Brown/AdTI report.
It’s time for gray and black propagandists to note that the
transparency of the net makes it increasingly difficult to hide the
truth. And that, I
believe, is a good thing.
The
report is available at www.Adti.net.
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