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Caldera's OpenLinuxLite and SysV init

By Pamela Jones et al.

Someone sent me a copy of Caldera's OpenLinux Lite 1.1, copyrighted 1997. We earlier looked at that version in an earlier article about ELF, but now I had my own copy to play with. Back then, according to the cover, Caldera was still located in Provo, Utah, not Lindon. So this is history. But it's relevant history, as I'll show you, relevant in particular to SCO v. IBM but also to the AutoZone case perhaps and hopefully to any future escapades SCO might be dreaming up.

Someone else had long ago sent me the Partner CD SCO distributed at SCOforum 2004, and right after I was looking through OpenLinux Lite, I dug it out and was looking at it again, and I noticed on the SCOforum CD the slides Chris Sontag showed during his keynote talk giving the audience an update on the IP litigation as SCO saw it back then. It's quite amusing to see how he pitched it -- as success after success -- given how it's turned out so far. But one slide hit me in a way that it never did before, probably because I had just looked at the list of everything distributed as source in OpenLinux Lite. As one example of copying, on slide 24, Sontag listed in connection with the IBM litigation allegedly infringed SYS V init code:

(ii) copying of UNIX System V init (SYS V init) code in Linux version 2.6

SYS V init? But I had just seen it on the list in the SRPMS list in Caldera's Open Linux Lite. Unless there is something very particular about the version of SYS V init in a distro that includes the Linux 2.6 kernel, something seems fishy in Lindon. Groklaw has thoroughly rebutted SCO's claims about ELF, I think, for example in Frank Sorenson's A Closer Look at the ABI Files, also in A Tall Tale About ELF and "PATCH: ELF registry now at Caldera" in 2002 & LKP and GNU Tools. We even showed ELF inside OpenLinux Lite 1.1 in that earlier article. I made a list once of all our ELF articles, but I couldn't find it for this article, but there have been a lot, and in my view, we've wrestled that ELF claim to the mat and held it down long enough to be declared the winner. But we've never addressed SYS V init directly. Let's get started now.

Full post as published by Groklaw on March 11, 2009 (boomark / email).