SGI fires back response to SCO

By Alun Williams

Posted on 2 Oct 2003 at 12:45

SGI has made a public reply to SCO over the ongoing Linux controversy, with an open letter from its VP of Software, Rich Altmaier.

In the communication, addressed to the 'Linux community', Altmaier states that the attitude of SCO is 'completely misplaced'. In particular, this is in reference to the handling of SGI's XFS journalling filesystem, which was made open source but which SCO alleges contains Unix System V code.

Saying 'SGI takes the subject of intellectual property rights seriously', Altmaier goes on to highlight the specific programming code that in contention.

When concerns were raised, by the Open Source community, about the status of an ate_utils.c module, Altmaier states SGI 'quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions' to open source. And he then goes into specific programming detail.

Essentially, fragments of code matching System V code were found in three generic routines (ate_utils.c, the atoi function and system info.h header file), relating to the I/O infrastructure for SGI's platform. He admits that these had been 'inadvertently included and in fact were redundant from the start', saying better replacements were found from the existing Linux kernel.

He emphasises that, all together, the three code fragments amounted to no more than 200 lines. (Putting this in context, he states that SGI has released over a million lines of code under an open source licence.)

Also, he states that 'most or all of the System V code fragments we found had previously been placed in the public domain, meaning it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case'.

The code was then completely removed, he states, from SGI's Linux website, and patches were distributed to customers to replace these routines (2.4 and 2.5 kernels, released on 30 June and 3 July 3).

However, even Altmaier concedes that disputed code may still be present. 'As a result of exhaustive investigation, SGI has discovered a few additional code segments (similar in nature to the segments referred to above and trivial in amount) that may arguably be related to UNIX code. We are in the process of removing and replacing these segments.' This will be meat and drink to SCO.

The long and detailed explanation of SGI's handling of the controversial code concludes with the defiant statement: 'We continue to release new Linux work, and are very excited about the growth and acceptance of Linux. We are continuing full speed to do new work and release new Linux products. We take our responsibility to the open source community seriously and are confident that we have an effective process to verify the quality and integrity of our contributions to Linux.'

You can find the full text of the letter on SGI's Open Source website.

As we reported yesterday - SGI feels the SCO heat - SGI has received notice from SCO that its Unix licence will be terminated on 14 October due, allegedly, to misappropriation of Unix code.

SCO sent a letter to SGI outlining its concerns back on 13 August and gave SGI two months to remedy 'all violations of the AT&T/SGI agreements'.