Dennis Ritchie Acknowledges the Code

By Pamela Jones
Groklaw

August 23, 2003

With all the speculation going on, I thought it made sense to just ask Dennis Ritchie himself if he wrote the code, as Bruce Perens suggested might be the case. His answer makes clear that this is definitely old code from the 70s, and here's what he says about authorship:

"So: either Ken or I wrote it originally. I know that the comments that first appeared by the 6th edition were definitely written by me, since I spent some time annotating the almost comment-free earlier editions."

So that's one piece we have nailed down. SCO said that they ought to know what they own. Well, I'd say Dennis Ritchie can be relied on to know what he and Ken Thompson wrote and when it was written.

02:21 AM EDT

radiocomment

brenda banks [ http://www.groklaw.net/users.php?mode=profile&uid=11 ]

August 22, 2003

most of the people on here are college educated and are professionals,i am not
so please bare with me if i mispell or my thoughts ramble.i remember reading at
one point where sco said something about the old ATT/BSD case and that some
things hadnt been fully looked into and now people on here were saying that this
sounded like they were bringing that back up.if that case was settled how can
they bring it back up for dispute or can they bring it up for dispute?
also from IBM's countersuit dont sco have to answer them in a certain frame of
time.Redhat vs sco i still havent heard if sco has answered that suit either.how
long do they have to acknowledge that suit.i get very lost each day trying to
keep up
i love my linux and the idea of having to pay 700 for it is just fraud and
extortion

03:43 AM EDT http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=245#c2367