SCO's case crumbling

Those who knows me will know I am a Linux advocate. Not that I use Linux much or do programming but because I believe in open source. Although Microsoft is a necessary evil to me, I do use a lot of open source programs such as Firefox and OpenOffice.

I did not know that one day I would be supporting the Goliath - in this case IBM! I won't bother you with the history of SCO Vs IBM. For those who wants to know more you can visit Linux.org or Groklaw for more information.

Anyway here is part of Dr. Randall Davis of MIT's second declaration:

III. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

16. Despite an extensive review, I could find no source code in any of the IBM Code that incorporates any portion of the source code contained in the Unix System V Code or is in any other manner similar to such source code. Accordingly, the IBM Code cannot be said, in my opinion, to be a modification or a derivative work based on Unix System V Code.

17. As explained in detail below, I used two programs, called COMPARATOR and SIM, to help automate the process. COMPARATOR looks for lines of text that are literally or nearly literally identical, while SIM looks for code that is syntactically the same.

18. I used both programs to compare all 26, 759 lines of the IBM Code identified by SCO against all 67,797,569 lines in the Unix System V Code.

19. I believe that the comparisons I performed using these tools are conservative and hence resulted in more potential matches than might otherwise be found using a less conservative approach.

20. These comparisons required on the order of 10 hours of computation time on a dual 3 GHz Xeon processor system with 2 GB of RAM. This is a high-end workstation routinely and easily available off the shelf from commercial vendors such as Dell.

21. COMPARATOR reported 15 potential hits. I reviewed each of these potential hits in detail and determined them not to be true matches of copied code, but rather coincidental matches of common terms in the C programming language. (Paragraphs 30 below discuss conincidental matches in COMPARATOR.

22. SIM did not report any potential hits.

It is pretty obvious that the courts would never find any so called 'SCO owned Unix' code in Linux and SCO's arguement is getting thinner by the day. You can find the whole text at Groklaw.

Source: Groklaw