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Red Hat Helps Fund EFF

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the cool-move-guys dept.

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.

3 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's nice, but $70,000 is nothing... by weave · · Score: 5
    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."

  2. USENIX Donations by FigWig · · Score: 5

    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.

    --
    Scuttlemonkey is a troll
  3. Red Hat's only way to stay alive by WNight · · Score: 5

    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.