[ale] SCO and morning philosophy questions

[J.M. Taylor]

Now I have to admit, I'm a fan of the Unisys's of the world making idiots
of themselves. And I've administered UnixWare before, so no love lost here
with SCO.  It seems that SCO is not specifying what pieces are stolen,
which just makes it seem like thick and foggy FUD.

I have what is perhaps a philosophical question for all -- how do they
know that this code is stolen? They say "code was munged about to hide its
origins"...but...how unlikely is it for two coders attacking the same
problem to sovle it in approximately the same way?  I develop stuff in PHP
and Perl, and I know very well that there are a zillion different ways to
solve a problem with these tools..but having worked closely with other
coders I'm often surprised when I look at their stuff and wonder if I
didn't write it, becuase it's identical to the way I would write
something, both in form and content.

I guess related to that is -- if a SCO developer wrote something for
UnixWare that was bound by an NDA and other agreements, and decided later
(or maybe after they quit) to do some kernel work on Linux, and apply the
strengths he's honed thru working on kernels professionally, is that
stealing?  Would the code not be very similar -- once a programmer has
solved a problem, how likely are they to change the fundamental way they
think about that problem, even if they recreate the code from scratch?

Just ramblings inspired by SCO's antics.
jenn


PS - check out this week's Economist, they've got a survey of the health
of the IT world. Linux is mentioned repeatedly as a cure for many ills. :)


Jonathan Rickman said:
> On 15 May 2003, Robert Heaven wrote:
>
>> I wonder how much Bill Gates paid SCO to do this.
>
> Doesn't matter. IBM is going to crush SCO. Try to look at it in a
> positive light. This could be the first test of the GPL. SCO released
> their so called IP under the GPL just like everyone else did. The execs
> at SCO seem to have forgotten that SCO = Caldera = Game Over.
>
> --
> Jonathan Rickman
> X Corps Security
> http://www.xcorps.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
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