On Monday 09 June 2003 09:25, Greg Freemyer wrote:
Curtis,
I hope your wrong in thinking that Cristoph Hellwig could be a source of contamination.
He is core kernel developer and IIRC in Linus's inner circle of trusted developers.
He and Alan Cox did the GFS to OpenGFS evaluation and setup 2 years ago.
I think he consulted with IBM on the JFS port and he is currently employed by SGI supporting XFS.
On the XFS port, I think it was Cristoph that did the major job of making XFS acceptable to Linus, and thus got it into the vanilla 2.5.x kernel.
If all of his contributions had to backed out of the Linux kernel, I suspect it would be a major blow.
Greg -- Greg Freemyer
Absolutely not. I have been doing research of sorts trying to find out who and when access to any thing SCO to Linux was/is accessible. I doing so the first name is that of Mr Hellwiq. Which at the present simply shows a SCO former employee that was also very active in the kernel development. I have also found that SCO openly made available its is APIs and other coding realated informations to anyone that went to the website and there was scant little regarding anything Unix that SCO seemed to care about in particular - at least until lately. I have also found that many developers from IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. etc. have had access and made available code to Linux. In this light there does not seem to be any wrong doing whatsoever - as I suspected. This is not a witch hunt that I am conducting. What I am trying to understand and share is the amount to which SCO freely made available, or not, it's unix base code and to the extent in which it actively encouraged the development of the Linux kernel. My general feeling is that SCO upper echelon is playing a dangerous game - a Grand Bluff. If one searches the various data on the web and at various sites ( including SCO's) one can see that on the surface there is no strong evidence that SCO was ripped off. On the contrary, the evidence shows that SCO sought to leverage the market and integrate its Unix products into the Linux market. It's contentions that it was taken advantage of is interesting seeings how evidence seems to indicate the opposite. SCO contributed only scant amounts of work and more over sought to integrate much of what was developed by Linux into its product base. This is especially questionable in regards to SCO's Unix products. I have a very strong hunch that SCO acually "contaminated" it's own Unix products with Linux/GPL code. Perhaps they fear that they have negated they IP holdings and rights and this is their idea of a pre-emptive effort to muddy the waters. If indications of what I have been reading is correct it's SCO that has blundered again - at least in light to it's claims of "trade secrets". They seem to want it both ways. Linux can give SCO anything it wants and SCO seems to be of a mind to integrate this at their leisure. But SCO latest contentions of misappropriated Unix code appears to hinge around ia64 development in which further evidence that SCO was relying on this as a major revenue stream. Furthermore, it appears that SCO unix base products were losing a favorable amount of it's clientele to Linux based on the ROI factor. Linux' normal course of development made it a much more plausible investment and SCO's inability to provide any real innovations in it's products seems to be the reason for a loss of market share. I also believe this is why HP and others opted to pursue Linux IA64 product base and hence SCO set this whole fiasco off. SCO seem to be suffering from sour grapes. It is my opinion that SCO will rue the day it pulled this stunt - at least it's investors and clients will. Cheers, Curtis.