Code red for open source?

Lines from Unix's source code have been copied into the heart of Linux, sometimes exactly and sometimes in a modified form designed to disguise their origin, SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride said Thursday. McBride's accusation cuts to the heart of the open-source movement's legal and philosophical underpinnings.

As part of its billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, which charges that Big Blue misappropriated SCO's Unix trade secrets and built them into Linux, SCO hired several consultants to compare the source codes of the two operating systems. "We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview. In addition, he said, "We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

McBride refused to detail which specific code had been copied but said there were several instances--"some of them go back several years, and others are recent"--and said the copying was "not minor." SCO, however, won't publish what it's found.

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