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Evidence Caldera Knew in 2002 - or Coulda Shoulda - That JFS in Linux Came From OS/2, not AIX

By Pamela Jones et al.

Let me sing you a song about frivolous claims. May I?

Lookee here [PDF], will you? It's a PDF on Caldera's own web site, a paper titled JFS for Linux, by IBM's Steve Best, dated February 2002, as you can see by the url. It's copyrighted 2002, too. I will assume for the sake of my song that Caldera knew what it was doing, read the paper, and agreed with its facts and wanted the world to read it, presumably since 2002. It's *still* there in 2009. Presumably public companies don't post materials on their websites without at least reading them, so somebody had to know at some point what it said and took affirmative steps to put it there.

It clearly tells the world where JFS for Linux came from -- from IBM's OS/2, not AIX.

Caldera, now calling itself the SCO Group, must have forgotten that the paper's there, I'm guessing, or it surely would have been sent to SCO's Heaven for Unhelpful Documents long ago. But can there be a reasonable assertion now that SCO doesn't know, or that it didn't know in 2002, or that it couldn't know before it launched a lawsuit against IBM over this very issue where JFS for Linux comes from? Caldera put that paper on its own website, so *somebody* there knew and approved it. Oops.

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).