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Some Pictures Worth a Thousand Words - Caldera OpenLinux Lite

By Pamela Jones et al.

I have some screenshots from an old Caldera OpenLinux Lite CD that a member still had in his possession to show you. They disprove certain allegations SCO has made regarding Linux, I think, in the IBM litigation. For example, SCO claimed that it never released anything under the GPL. And it tried to allege that some headers and other features were their property and that Linux infringes them. I will show you differently.

Interestingly, the CD's Credits file mentions Ralph Yarro, among others. The copyright information states that they used Red Hat's Linux and then added some tweaks of their own to it, and they list files and applications that were not under the GPL, and none of the files in the screenshots are listed as excluded. All the rest, they say, were distributed under the GPL. The Announce file is particularly interesting, because it mentions ELF directly, and that speaks to whether SCO knew what they were distributing under the GPL. I asked Dr Stupid to look at the screenshots and tell me what it means to him, and here's what he told me:

Well, it's confirmatory evidence that Caldera shipped errno and STREAMS under the GPL, in particular that they took the conscious decision to include STREAMS (since Red Hat didn't.)

The ANNOUNCE file, where they specifically point out ELF support, is useful as it shows that inclusion of elf support was not accidental. And at the time, it was still just about possible to create a Linux system that only used a.out (i.e. to remove ELF support) although it would have been a lot of work if you were starting with a copy of Red Hat.

So, let me show you the screenshots now.

Full post as published by Groklaw on August 07, 2008 (boomark / email).