SCO's MIT Experts not actually from MIT
SCO alleged a couple of months ago that code copying between Unix and Linux was detected by a team from MIT, amongst other things. Laura DiDio, effusive as ever, seemed terribly impressed in an interview with Sam Varghese:
SCO hired three separate teams of code experts, including a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to SCO, these groups all found code in Linux that purportedly originated in the Unix System V kernel and not BSD.
It now remains to be seen whether IBM and its teams of legal experts can refute the findings of SCO's experts in court. Expect reams of documentation and lots of minutiae!!!! I'm glad I'm not the judge on this case. As an aside, I give SCO credit for getting the best legal and technical advice. Their attorney David Boies is top notch and spent 31 years working for IBM's attorneys and you don't find a group with more technical prowess than MIT (though the great minds at Stanford University in California would beg to differ!).
Seriously though, the fact that legal and technical experts of this calibre are willing to take SCO on says something. In an age of "experts for hire" it's still questionable whether people of this calibre would lend their names to a case that lacked merit.
Yes, Laura, I'm sure everybody else is also glad you're not the judge. :-) (Does anyone take seriously an “analyst” who uses quadruple exclamation marks?)
It's interesting that DiDio uses the phrase “lend their names”, when the one thing this group has not done is put their names to their work. Indeed, they apparently specified in their contract with SCO that their names must not be revealed. Sometimes there are good reasons to work anonymously, but if you won't put your own name on your work, it seems unfair to put down the name of a university. Did MIT really want its good name associated with such a travesty?
And what precisely does “group from MIT mean?” It might mean “people working at MIT”, or it might mean “some people who went to MIT but dropped out.” It's vague but suggestive — prime FUD material.
The truth is now out: according to an article in MIT's The Tech, the second is the case: the people involved had had some kind of link with MIT in the past, but they are certainly not employed at the moment.
What a tangled web we weave.
posted Tue 26 Aug 2003 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link
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