Re: SCO, IBM, and cladistics
On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Andrew P. Porter wrote:
>
>
>
>
> About the SCO vs. Linux lawsuit,
>
> >From the Linuxandmain website:
>
> http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=361
>
> It is not obvious that the Linux kernal got any code from SCO;
> the text could have traveled in the other direction
> (or both come from a common source).
>
> The less obvious suggestion is that the problem of assessing the ancestry
> (or more precisely, relatedness) of texts
> has been treated in a highly quantitative way by evolutionary biologists.
Unfortunately, though, in this case relatedness is not the same thing as
ancestry - one of the possible histories here is that SCO stole code from
GPLed code bases, not the reverse. In that case relatedness is high, but
directionality is the other way.
ap
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists@perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
Reply to: