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Turning our attention back to SCO v. IBM, a nugget about errno.h and the GPL

By Pamela Jones et al.

Now that the Novell sideshow appears to be finished, subject to any appeals either side might bring (or even requests for reconsideration), I think it's time to turn our attention back to the main tent, and that would be SCO v. IBM, which will be ramping up in due time.

With that in mind, I found something that relates to two of SCO's claims, first that it can sue over header files and second that it never deliberately released any code under the GPL. It's a request for help on a message board back in 1999 from a user trying to compile something called R, which is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, a GNU project. It runs on Windows and BSD and UNIX and Linux, and he was trying to get it to work on Caldera OpenLinux 2.3. The individual posts the problem encountered, which seems to involve a missing errno.h for linux file, and guess where the solution turns up? On one of Caldera's CDs that the person hadn't installed yet:

The kernel-headers were not installed on my machine, but there is a package on the Open Linux 2.3 CD. I believe they weren't installed simply because I didn't choose to have all the development tools/libraries added when I installed linux. I didn't realize how soon I'd be compiling things.

2. The missing package that led to my posting to this list. It can be found on the COL install CD and is called linux-kernel-include.rpm.

I'll show you both of the messages in full, and explain why I think this proves that Caldera did distribute under the GPL, making up a special package which included header files, and it distributed errno.h and one presumes the others on purpose, knowingly.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 26, 2008 (boomark / email).