Who Forgot to Tell Us that Linux is a Copy of UNIX?

May 2nd, 2008 by Justin Ryan

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According to legend, the priestess of Apollo at the Delphic Oracle was supposed to have delivered wild, frenzied, sometimes nonsensical prophecies after breathing mystical vapors rising from the ground beneath her three-legged stool. We're guessing something similar must have happened in Utah on Wednesday, because the words coming from the witness box in Judge Kimball's courtroom were certainly wild, frenzied, and most definitely nonsensical.

We told you yesterday that the events in Salt Lake City were getting interesting but exhausting, but now the details of what has been said are starting to come out. According to reports, during testimony on Wednesday, SCO CEO Darl McBride — the Chief Architect of SCO's Sue-and-Screw™ Strategy — not only repeated the infamous unsubstantiated claim that Linux includes UNIX SVRX code, but went on to say under oath perhaps the most outrageous thing he's ever said — an over-achievement if there ever was one. What'd he say? "It's the same thing. Linux is a replica of our UNIX, period."

Now, we're journalists, not psychologists, so we'll refrain from making judgments about Mr. McBride's need for a mental health review, but we're certainly left wondering how — with perjury in Federal Court carrying a five-year prison sentence — one walks in, swears to tell the truth, and proceeds to say something like that. The kicker, though, is that Senior VP Chris Sontag took the stand before McBride, and testified that he had no knowledge of any UnixWare code in Linux — and Darl didn't know it, because witnesses are being sequestered from other witnesses' testimony. Given Jude Kimball's less-than-tolerant stance for SCO's shenanigans, we foresee hot water in Mr. McBride's future...
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Justin Ryan is News Editor for LinuxJournal.com.
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To compliment the mobile we've got the stationary: parsing command line options with getopt, checking your Ruby code with metric_fu, and building a secure Squid proxy. How is this stationary you ask? What can we say? It's not. We just wanted to see if anybody actually read this part of the page :) .


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