Red Hat Helps Fund EFF

DAldredge sent us linkage to a ZD Net article that talks about Red Hat announcing that it would be sending the EFF ^[?] $70k to help with the defense in fair use and reverse engineering cases, specifically like the recent DeCSS hoopla. Update: 05/22 12:30 by CT : Marc Ewing wrote in to tell us that this $ actually came from the Red Hat Center, started by him and Bob Young.

Comments

In related news: Andover are doing their bit too!

[mattbee]

Though Slashdot seem a bit coy about it (maybe for good reason): the RIAA are suing Superpimp Software, the guy(s) who make the Pan newsreader for Gnome, because, ummm, it decodes attachments. They want them to remove the program's MIME decoding capabilities because you can trade MP3s that way. The RIAA's final out-of-court offer was for Superpimp comply, they refused, and Andover are putting up money for the defence.

C'mon, guys, surely this is a story! :-)

Re:That's nice, but $70,000 is nothing...

[weave]

RedHat may have a large market valuation, but you can't draw a check on that amount without selling off more of the company, and if they start giving away all of their liquid capital, you'll see investors dump RHAT like mad and then "it won't be worth dick."

Look at how many copies of RedHat Deluxe they have to sell to get $70,000 (not accounting for packaging expenses) to get a better handle on their generosity.

Besides, no one said it was the last gift and no one should expect RedHat to fund it all. Other companies whose business revolves around"free software" should be chipping in as well.

I say, "Bravo Redhat."

Re:Good

[gad_zuki!]

All the time, but they prefer to be called Lobbyists and Mr. Congressman.

It's about time...

[shaldannon]

...for one of the big companies making money to put some back for something like legal defense. Now what about VA? Andover? Penguin? etc.?

I contributed to the DeCSS cause by buying a T-Shirt with the decss_descramble code on it. It's nice to see someone with deeper pockets helping out too.


Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?

Copyright Cartels

[alexburke]

ZDNet has an excellent article on the copyright cartels. It's very well written.

On another note, Red Hat has been pretty quiet about the MPAA/RIAA/napster/wrapster brouhaha lately. It's good to see them weigh in!

--
"Give him head?" ... "Be a beacon?"

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft Ad

USENIX Donations

[FigWig]

Another organization that has been important in the computing community is USENIX. I haven't seen them get any attention on slashdot, but they donated US$100,000 to EFF to help fight the DeCSS case as well as cryptography cases.

Red Hat's only way to stay alive

[WNight]

They know they've got the support this sort of thing or MS will simply use the UCITA/DMCA to kill all other OSes.

Until now we've been able to reverse engineer file systems and protocols, products like SAMBA are examples of what "we" have done with this.

But if the UCITA and DMCA are used to prevent reverse engineering, products like that won't just be impossible to write, but if we did, they'd be illegal. The only hope of any other OS vendor is to squash those laws before they become too broadly applied.

All MS needs to do under the DMCA is put a routine in the networking to check for valid serial numbers, then it becomes copy protection and even if we were able to get around UCITA restrictions (by doing it out of the USA) on reverse engineering, a compatible network protocol would break their copy protection and thus be illegal similar to DeCSS. (Or what the MPAA says about DeCSS.)

It's good to see RedHat join the fight.

Good

[BMIComp]

It's good to see Redhat donate money to a cause that they believe in. So, when's microsoft going to donate money to common crooks?