Cobb

The code SCO showed represents an algorithm that can be used to manage a computer's memory...Not a very interesting piece of code in itself, this is very basic "allocate a smaller chunk of memory out of a list of bigger chunks." The function is described in a lot of places, and exists in original Unix code and is apparently written by Ken Thompson himself. It shows up in the Lion book (a commentary on the traditional Unix), and the code is described in [Maurice J.] Bach's "The Design of the Unix Operating System." In other words, it's not only 30 years old; it's actually been documented several times. It's also part of BSD Unix, which was shown to not be a derived work of the AT&T copyrights 10 years ago.

It's part of the "original Unix" archives that Dennis Ritchie has made available, and from a legal perspective (and also of ironic interest), it's also part of all the code that Caldera made freely available back when they still remembered that they were a Linux company and had made all their money on the Linux IPO. Ironically, the piece of code that [SCO demonstrated this week] had already been removed in [the Linux kernel] 2.6.x—and not because of copyright issues, but because developers complained about how "ugly" it was. So not only is the code available under the BSD copyright, it had been removed in new versions of Linux even before SCO made it public.

But what I find interesting is how it shows that the SCO people are having such a hard time with the truth. They've said several times that the code they have found is not "historic Unix" code and "not BSD" code (which they know you can't infringe, since BSD has been shown to be independent, and Caldera itself released the historic code in 2002). To counter the open-source peoples' contention that any shared code is likely of BSD or "ancient Unix" origin, [SCO's] claimed several times how it's "modern System V" code that they have clear ownership of. That's despite massive proof to the contrary, going back three decades.