SCO unveils disputed code

The SCO Group’s case against Linux appeared to falter in its first public unveiling of two snippets of Linux source code that the company claims were inappropriately copied into the free operating system.

Within two days of showing the code at its annual SCO Forum user conference in Las Vegas last week, Linux advocates had analyzed the code and countered that it was legitimate.

“I think that these are probably the best examples that SCO has to show, and they’re awful. They would not stand up for a day in court,” said Linux advocate Bruce Perens, who published an extensive analysis of SCO’s code on perens.com, his Web site.

SCO’s first example, some code used to manage the computer’s memory, was actually released under an open source license by SCO itself in 2002 and could be legitimately used in Linux, Perens said. This code was recently removed from the Linux kernel because it was redundant, Perens said.

The second piece of code, which SCO claimed was so closely based on its copyrighted material as to be in violation of its intellectual property rights, was in fact a legitimate “clean room” rewriting of some Unix networking code, according to the man who wrote it, Jay Schulist.

Schulist said that he has never seen the original Unix source code that he is alleged to have copied. “I have no idea why they would even chose my code,” he said. “If they had done any research at all, they would have realized that there was no other way to implement the actual filtering engine.

SCO officials disputed the Linux community’s analysis, but the company has clearly stumbled in its first public effort to prove its case, said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. “If they haven’t been able to reveal a large chink of code that is open and shut, then one has to believe that there isn’t any or that they are very loath to reveal it,” he said.

Weiss believes SCO — which projected between $9 million and $12 million in revenue from its Unix licensing programs for the current quarter — is under mounting pressure to prove that it really has a case. “They obviously need positive publicity. They are getting skewered on the issue that they’re not coming clean on what they contend is theft of their IP,” he said.

There is a perception that SCO has not been forthcoming about its allegations, SCO CEO Darl McBride admitted. But it was a false perception, he argued. “Are we trying to conceal things? No, it’s actually the other way around. We’re trying to be extremely open.”