I don't know how many of you might have followed the alarmingly absurd and litigious organization that SCO became around 2001/2002, but there are some interesting examples of how to be stupid that can be identified. Case-in-point, SCO v Novell finally went to trial this week. One of the fundamental claims of SCO is that they own System V UNIX (Novell disputes this), and furthermore, that Linux is based in whole or in part on that code base. There's a great note on Slashdot today talking about how SCO's CEO, Darl McBride, has testified in direct contradiction of his own people to this effect.
The fact of the matter is that nothing could be further from the truth. Linux was developed from a completely independent code base on Minix back in the early 90s by Linus Torvalds while he was in school. Evidence of Linux code independence, at his own hands, is available from CMU, in which he states on 25 Aug 1991:
"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(."
What this means is that he wrote original code for everything, relying on standards such as POSIX, and modeling his approach around the GNU free UNIX approach.
Silly Darl... guess he should have spent a little more time studying history before he went off and started filing frivolous lawsuits...
