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News source: Tech-Critic

"But [the errno.h files] obviously have the same error names. That's not because they were copied; it's because that's specified by several standards, not Unix per se—you'll find those error names in any operating system that has a C compiler," Torvalds said.

Torvalds and other Linux leaders were personally issued subpoenas in the SCO case.

Torvalds said he picked two of the 71 files SCO listed as examples of intellectual-property theft; ones that he had written himself.

"This is just a quick analysis, but it boils down to the fact that SCO is [yet again] claiming copyright on something that they did not write, and that I can prove that they did not write," Torvalds said.

Torvalds moved his discussion into the code itself.

"SCO lists the files 'include/linux/ctype.h' and 'lib/ctype.h,' and some trivial digging show that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux [of September, 1991]. I can state I wrote them. Looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed—the 'toupper()' and 'tolower()' macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so!"

He continued that "the details in them aren't even the same as in the BSD/Unix files. The approach is the same, but if you look at actual implementation details you will notice that it's not just that my original 'tolower/toupper' were embarrassingly ugly; a number of other details differ, too."

"In short: for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files are trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any Unix code, ever. So it's definitely not a question of 'all derivative branches,' [rather] it's a question of the fact that I can show—and SCO should have been able to see—that [SCO's] list clearly shows original work, not 'copied' work," Torvalds asserted.

In addition, Torvalds claimed that some similarities (and differences) between Linux and traditional Unix can be attributed to the limited number of ways available to efficiently implement programming functions and other features.

"Both Linux and traditional Unix use a naming scheme of 'underscore and a capital letter' for the flag names. There are flags for 'is upper case' (_U) and 'is lower case' (_L), and surprise, surprise, both Unix and Linux use the same name. But think about it: If you wanted to use a short flag name, and you were limited by the C standard naming, what names would you use? Maybe you'd select 'U' for 'Upper case' and 'L' for 'Lower case?'"

"Looking at the other flags, Linux uses '_D' for 'Digit', while traditional Unix instead uses '_N' for 'Number'. Both make sense, but they are different."

"I personally think that the Linux naming makes more sense (the function that tests for a digit is called 'isdigit()', not 'isnumber()'), but on the other hand I can certainly understand why Unix uses '_N'—the function that checks for whether a character is 'alphanumeric' is called 'isalnum(),' and that checks whether the character is an upper-case letter, a lower-case letter or a digit (a k a 'number')," Torvalds said.

"In short, there aren't that many ways you can choose the names, and there is lots of overlap, but it's clearly not 100 percent," he said.