The Kevin Trove

In July 2010, erstwhile SCO attorney Kevin McBride (Darl McBride’s elder brother) made public a substantial number of source documents that comprised part of SCO’s sealed Final Disclosure. These documents have become known as The Kevin Trove and they are preserved here for posterity.

Mr McBride apparently published them without permission, in a fit of pique, shortly after the adverse verdict in SCO v Novell on 10th June 2010. He believed that these documents prove some tiny parts of Linux and Linux-related software were copied from Unix SVR4, even if SCO could no longer maintain its charade of ownership of Unix.

But to anyone skilled in programming, they prove the exact opposite:

• the program texts have clearly been written independently
• there are superficial similarities that arise because they are independently created embodiments of the same published standard interfaces
• sometimes SCO’s documents shamelessly slice and rearrange the texts to take elements out of context and manufacture similarity where none actually exists (e.g. Tab 244)
• sometimes the alleged copying is vanishingly small (e.g. Tab 250)

Taking Item 217 (Tab 241) as an example, there are 65 lines in glibc’s strings.h, but just two lines – the prototype declarations of strcasecmp and strncasecmp – are complained of, and the only parts of those declarations that match are the function name and the return type. Yet the code of those two functions is not complained of. If this was theft, the thief would have taken the diamond tiara instead of the glass case.

The appearance is that Kevin McBride no longer practices law. His website at mcbride-law.com displays the message

This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later. 

However, almost all of The Kevin Trove is preserved at the Internet Archive, whereby you can verify the provenance of these documents.