Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Linus defends Linux
I kept wondering throughout the SCO allegations (accusing Linux of violating its UNIX copyright and license) against Linux why Linus Torvalds was maintaining an uncharacteristic silence. Well, the New York Times reports that Torvalds has decided to finally speak out and defend his baby.
SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included large chunks of copied Unix code. But the letters being sent out - urging companies to stop using Linux or to pay SCO license fees - listed for the first time more than 65 software files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code and contributed to Linux."
"Some of these files were written by me directly," Mr. Torvalds said in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux project by third parties, including I.B.M., which is being sued by SCO. The files listed in SCO's letter are written in the C programming language. Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h," Mr. Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux" in September 1991.
"In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any Unix code, ever. "I can show, and SCO should have been able to see, that the list they show clearly shows original work, not copied."
SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included large chunks of copied Unix code. But the letters being sent out - urging companies to stop using Linux or to pay SCO license fees - listed for the first time more than 65 software files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code and contributed to Linux."
"Some of these files were written by me directly," Mr. Torvalds said in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux project by third parties, including I.B.M., which is being sued by SCO. The files listed in SCO's letter are written in the C programming language. Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h," Mr. Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux" in September 1991.
"In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any Unix code, ever. "I can show, and SCO should have been able to see, that the list they show clearly shows original work, not copied."
