(no subject)

An open letter to the Linux community published by Silicon Graphics Inc. 
indicates that SGI has conducted a comprehensive comparison of the Linux 
kernel and the Unix System V source code owned by The SCO Group Inc.

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According to the letter, authored by SGI Vice President of Software Rich 
Altmaier, SGI conducted an "exhaustive comparison" of the Linux kernel and the 
Unix System V source code, which turned up only "trivial" code segments 
that "may arguably be related" to SCO's software.

The letter also disputed SCO's claims that SGI inappropriately contributed its 
XFS (eXtensible File System) code to the Linux operating system. 

For months SCO has claimed that an exhaustive examination of the Linux source 
code has revealed software that has been copied line-by-line from its Unix 
System V code base. The Linux community has denied these allegations, but 
until this week no one else had claimed to have undertaken a comprehensive 
comparison of the two operating systems.

SGI's letter was published just as SCO revealed that it had threatened to 
terminate SGI's Unix license, alleging that the Mountain View, California, 
computer maker inappropriately contributed source code to Linux. Earlier this 
year, SCO announced that it had terminated IBM Corp.'s AIX license, citing 
similar allegations. The Lindon, Utah, company is now engaged in a US$3 
billion lawsuit with IBM over the matter.

SGI's code comparison was done during September using the Comparator software 
created by open source advocate Eric Raymond, as well as some other internally 
developed tools, according to SGI. It compared source code from the Unix 
System V release 4.1 software that SGI has licensed from SCO with a version of 
the Linux kernel released this June, SGI said.

"Our review was focused on the code we contributed to Linux; however, we did 
run the Comparator code on the Linux 2.4.21 kernel. The process involves using 
subjective judgment to review similarities identified by the tool," said Greg 
Estes, SGI's vice president of corporate marketing, in an e-mail response to 
questions.

The point of SGI's comparison was to search for any potential matches between 
Unix System V and any contributions that SGI made to the Linux kernel, not to 
vet the software for the entire community, Estes said in an interview. "We are 
not making any kind of representation at all about anybody else's contributed 
code," he said.

SGI first reviewed its open source contributions earlier this summer, and 
Altmaier's letter concedes that SGI discovered at that time that three "brief 
fragments" of SGI-contributed code matched the Unix System V code that SGI had 
licensed from SCO.

"All together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than 200 
lines (of code)," wrote Altmaier. "It appears that most or all of the System V 
fragments we found had previously been placed in the public domain, meaning it 
is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code 
fragments," he added.

The code in question was no longer in the core Linux kernel, following the 
Aug. 25 release of Linux 2.4.22, Altmaier wrote. 

Then in September SGI carried out its more comprehensive comparison. "SGI 
continued our investigation to determine whether any other code in the Linux 
kernel was even conceivably implicated," Altmaier states in the letter. 

This comparison revealed a few examples of line-by-line copying, but did not 
determine whether the code was owned by SCO or in the public domain, according 
to the letter. "SGI has discovered a few additional code segments ... that may 
arguably be related to the Unix code," Altmaier wrote. He added that these 
segments were "trivial in amount."

SGI declined to reveal any details on the additional code segments it found, 
but the fact that its analysis appears to reveal no extensive overlap between 
the code in Linux and System V is good news for Linux users, according to 
Gartner Inc. analyst George Weiss.

"I think it's very helpful," he said. But more information is needed to fully 
respond to SCO's copyright allegations, he added. "I don't know if the job is 
complete from this letter," Weiss said.

It would be more helpful if other SCO licensees like Hewlett-Packard Co. or 
IBM Corp. performed similar analyses and went public with their results, Weiss 
said. 

Such a thorough vetting of the Linux code might answer questions about line-by-
line copying, but it would not counter all of SCO's charges, he added. SCO 
claims that Linux also contains derivative works built on top of its System V 
Unix, such as the XFS code that SGI contributed to Linux, as well 
as "obfuscated" code that is almost identical to SCO's Unix. These claims 
would not be answered by the kind of analysis that SGI has done, Weiss said.

Weiss praised the tack SGI has taken with its letter, saying that Altmaier's 
response has helped mitigate SCO's allegations. "I thought it was one of the 
best responses (to SCO) that I had seen. Instead of getting deeply offensive 
and heaping abuse on SCO, they took a more productive approach, attempting to 
see what the claims might be," he said.

The fact that SGI has replaced the three code fragments in question does not 
satisfy SCO, according to Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman. "These releases have 
already taken place in Linux," he said. "You still have all these machines out 
there that haven't applied patches that are still benefitting from this Unix 
System V code."

Any line-by-line contribution of SCO's code to Linux was "not trivial," he 
added.


Its more certainly GNU.

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