[Linux-aus] JFS, SCO, IBM and OS/2

[Chris Samuel]

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Regarding: 

	"SCO Owns Your Computer"

http://www.byte.com/documents/s=8276/byt1055784622054/0616_marshall.html

Trevor Marshall writes that (amongst other things) SCO are claiming IP over 
IBM's JFS that was ported to Linux, and that Linux stole SMP from UNIX.

To put SCO's claim in context regarding JFS it is well worth reading the first 
question (which confusingly appears at the end of the file) in IBM's JFS for 
Linux FAQ at:

	http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/jfs/project/pub/faq.txt

To quote:

Q1. What is the history of the source based use for the port of JFS for Linux.

A1:
    [....]
    The new Journaled File System, on which the Linux port was based, was
    first shipped in OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness in April, 1999, after
    several years of designing, coding, and testing. 
    [....]
    In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS
    source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.

So does this mean that SCO are claiming ownership of OS/2 as well ?

As for SMP, some basic history on the part of SCO regarding their own 
involvement as Caldera in the development of SMP in Linux would not go amiss.

They should really read this now rather ironic credit from Alan Cox's website 
regarding the development of SMP for Linux at:

	http://www.linux.org.uk/SMP/title.html

He writes:

	At the moment I am developing using a Caldera provided ASUS P54PNIP4
	motherboard with 32Mb of RAM

Indeed, Caldera (now SCO) have a rather prominent banner at the top of the 
page in recognition of their support for the development of SMP.  This page 
is archived at the Internet Archive's wayback machine as of December 11th 
1997 in substantially the same form, except the motherboard only had 16Mb at 
that time.  Alan's page still has a PICS timestamp from April 1996 of 
"1996.04.16T08:15-0500", identical to that of the page on the Wayback 
Machine.

To add insult to injury, SCO claim credit for their assistance in the 
development of SMP on their own website at:

	http://www.sco.com/developers/community/contrib/linux.html

to quote:

	- Early support of the SMP development effort (hardware provided to the
	  SMP development team)

Making them an accomplice.  Perhaps they should sue themselves as well ?

Chris, a rather annoyed longtime Linux user..
- -- 
 Chris Samuel  :  http://csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC

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