SGI cleans up its Linux

BANGALORE: The SCO group has set its sights on SGI. SCO had sent a notice to SGI saying that it plans to terminate SGI's Unix license for IRIX. SCO claims that SGI's XFS journaling file system has Unix System V derivative code, which belongs to SCO. In a letter to the Linux community, SGI has denied that its XFS has any part of SCO’s UNIX code. It has also clarified that it has cleaned up a few instances of UNIX code in its open source offerings.

“SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX System V.”

Regarding instances of “proprietary” UNIX code in SGI Linux, “As one of many contributors to the Open Source movement and to Linux, SGI takes the subject of intellectual property rights seriously. We quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions to open source, and found brief fragments of code matching System V code in three generic routines, all within the I/O infrastructure support for SGI's platform. The three code fragments had been inadvertently included and in fact were redundant from the start. We found better replacements providing the same functionality already available in the Linux kernel. All together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than 200 lines out of the more than one million lines of our overall contributions to Linux. “, says Rich Altmaier VP of Software, SGI.

The three System V code fragments were apparently been placed previously in the public domain, which means that it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case. However, the three pieces of code have been removed from SGIs Linux website “as a precaution”.

SGI also says that following this occurrence, they have continued our investigation to determine whether any other code in the Linux kernel was even conceivably implicated. As a result of that 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. “, says SGI