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Item 166: Copyright on Planet BizarroItem 166 is one of the items Judge Wells flushed for irreparable vagueness. Here's what we know about it: Disclosure of Streams implementation from SVR4 [SCO 707 p.14]. Misappropriation in the form of non-literal transfers of methods, structures and sequences from System V contributed to Linux [SCO 724-A p.3]. SCO expressly included some of the Disputed Items in its copyright claim [IBM 748 p.41]. Copyright infringement [IBM 838-1 p.48]. The basis for its claim is an email which refers to "Sun's documentation [web]site" [IBM 981-H p#9] From the "yes, we can google" department, here on LKML is that exact smoking email (edited for length) -- From "Robert White" <>
Subject RE: Make pipe data structure be a circular list of pages, rather than Date Mon, 10 Jan 2005 15:23:26 -0800 Howdy, This entire discussion of the pipe and splice() is very much the same (issue, problem, approach) as the STREAMS interface from UNIX SVR4, which had the pipe device as its trivial example device. [This is all from vague recall, so forgive the sketchiness 8-)] [Note: check out this STREAMS programmers guide http://docs-pdf.sun.com/802-1933/802-1933.pdf from Sun's documentation site.] A Message was a fixed-size Message structure with a linked list of Buffers attached to it. The Buffers were a structure-and-payload arrangement as in (over-expressed here). The whole arrangement could be zero-copy or self condensing as needed. [...] STREAMS was a little over done and could have used some of the Linuxisims like tasklets (instead of "the STREAMS Scheduler"), and the bulk of the nonsense for getting Message and Buffer and STREAMS Head structures just screams Slab Cache, but it has a lot of interesting bits. The reason I bring it up is four-fold. [...] Rob White, Casabyte, Inc. This is interesting in many ways. (1) At a guess, SCO found this item (and several others) merely by searching LKML for 'svr4'. (2) They were still amassing new allegations in January 2005. (3) It's *not* a 'disclosure' by an IBM person! That underscores the fact that it *isn't* a contract claim! The claim against IBM is for *passively redistributing* *non-literal* *methods and concepts* disclosed by a *third party*. It is left to the reader's reflection whether such a legal theory is tenable. However, Judge Wells, in the course of her own reflection, decided that, without Linux code coordinates, there was no case to answer that IBM had ever made such a redistribution. In other words, if the "four-fold" methods and concepts ever got into the Linux kernel [*], it should (as any fool knows) have been possible for SCO to say where in the Linux kernel they were non-literally expressed. If they are not *expressed* in Linux, they are not *in* Linux, and therefore the allegation against IBM fails. (That's the difference vis-a-vis the contract claims, where the disclosure itself is held to be the cause of action.) (4) Definitely a bit of negative know-how in Rob White's post :-) (5) I originally thought this LKML post was a false positive, but the typography in 981-H is very specific, and, as I shall write later, it turns out that there are *more* of these third party paracopyright items. SCO's complaint about the SGI-contributed atmalloc code is far from unique. [*] Note that expression of STREAMS methods and concepts in LiS has its own set of items, 150-164. 166 is apparently a complaint that the kernel's implementation of pipes might have got tainted. |
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Msg # | Subject | Author | Recs | Date Posted |
26991 | Re: Item 166: Copyright on Planet Bizarro | karl_w_lewis | 28 | 4/10/2007 9:19:31 AM |