SCO vs the Penguin?
Every C programmer knows the classic K&R book - named after the authors Kernigan and Ritchie. It’s short but is the ultimate C reference written by C Creator Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernigan. It’s not an easy read and C should NOT be your first programming language but this is the bible for C.
Ken Thomson wrote the B language, a precursor to Ritchie’s C, at Bell Labs where the two worked. In 1969 Thomson wrote Unix and in 1973 he rewrote it in Ritchie’s C language.
Unix has been an amazing animal ever since those Bell Lab (AT&T) days. The portability, multitasking and multi-user functionality are still essential to any good OS. It was a brilliant piece of work and all the variations of Unix such as Xenix and AIX never strayed too far from the home base of Unix.
Currently, the license to the original Unix is held by the SCO Group which used to be Caldera. Recently, SCO sent a message to 1,350 commercial Linux users warning that Linux “infringes on our Unix intellectual property and other rights.”
That opened the floodgates.
Let’s face it. In all probability, Linus Torvalds did include “lines and blocks” of code from the Unix kernel in his Linux code. I bet that Dave Cutler who moved from writing DEC’s Vax VMS systems to Microsoft’s Windows NT may have had some code snippets in mind too. That’s just how the real world works.
The interesting part of the story is why SCO and why now? Conspiracy theorists think that Microsoft is behind the move. Microsoft did use to own a piece of SCO.
Reaction from the Linux community, not an apathetic bunch, has been predictably swift. SCO's networks were recently 90% shut down by a “large-scale” coordinated denial of service attack (DoS).
This is one to stay tuned to - I’ll be posting more soon.
12:07:29 PM 
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