Creator of Linux Defends Its Originality
By STEVE LOHR
NY Times
Published: December 23, 2003

Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular Linux computer operating system, defended his work yesterday as not always lovely but original - and certainly not copied, as a Utah company has contended.

The Utah company, the SCO Group, has begun sending out a round of warning letters to large corporate users of Linux, which is distributed free. The letters, dated Friday, assert that Linux, a variant of the Unix operating system, violates an SCO license and copyright. SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, (says it.ed. ) owns the rights to the Unix operating system. SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included large chunks of copied Unix code. But the letters being sent out - urging companies to stop using Linux or to pay SCO license fees - listed for the first time more than 65 software files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code and contributed to Linux."

Mr. Torvalds began looking at these files, and their history, yesterday. As a student in Finland, he wrote the original kernel of the Linux operating system in 1991. Mr. Torvalds, who now lives in Silicon Valley, has since continued to oversee the growth of the Linux project, which relies on contributions from a worldwide network of programmers.

"Some of these files were written by me directly," Mr. Torvalds said in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux project by third parties, including I.B.M., which is being sued by SCO.

The files listed in SCO's letter are written in the C programming language. Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h," Mr. Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux" in September 1991.

"I wrote them," Mr. Torvalds noted, "and looking at the original ones I'm a bit ashamed."

He observed that some of the macros, or programming shortcuts, are "so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)" - ending his comment with the e-mail symbol for winking and smiling.

Mr. Torvalds's talent as a communicator, including his self-deprecating humor, is one reason for the remarkable progress of the Linux project.

But Mr. Torvalds is also clearly angered by SCO's accusation that much of Linux was merely copied. "In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any Unix code, ever.

"I can show, and SCO should have been able to see, that the list they show clearly shows original work, not copied."

Darl C. McBride, the chief executive of SCO, said he stood by the company's assertions. He said that a Linux expert who will testify in the SCO suit against I.B.M., which was filed last March, went over the code closely. "As a social revolutionary, Linus Torvalds is a genius," Mr. McBride said. "But at the speed the Linux project has gone forward something gets lost along the way in terms of care with intellectual property."

The dispute over the Unix and Linux heritage became even more tangled yesterday when Novell, a software company, announced it had filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for copyright on some of the same Unix code for which SCO claims the rights.

Note: SCO generates less than 20 million dollars in annual sales, and has lost money constantly for the past few years. Since they seem incapable of adding anything posiive to the IT mix circa 2004, it appears they are simply trying to force their hand into other companies pockets with false claims of ownership over the base Unix code, which had been previously been owned by AT&T, and Novell, and is only tangentially related to Linux source code.

Microsoft and the RSA started this threatening letter bullshit a few years ago, and one hopes McBride and his SCO cronies suffer the same backlash as these other critters received for their dastardly deeds.