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Red Hat Working w/UCITA Backers to Change Law
GroundBounce writes "Here's an article at NewsForge detailing how Red Hat is taking the initiative to broker deals with state legislatures to change parts of UCITA [?] which are damaging to open source software, such as mandatory warranties and reverse engineering. They are also working with the uniform law commission to try to change the prototype for the law." Good work by Red Hat - that's a necessary change.
In my experience, people who believe in approach #1 also believe that taking approach #2 is heresy.
In reality, you need both types of political agents. If a complete rejection of UCITA fails to happen - because MS et al are more politically powerful than your list - then you will hope against hope that the folks working from within were successful.
You have the same goals, you just have different approaches to reaching them. You are not taking the high road by trying to discredit Red Hat; you may be shooting yourself in the foot.
EULAs and the like are framed as contracts: you give up certain rights (such as the right to publicly criticize the software) in exchange for the "right to use" the software. The fact that you already had the right to use it, since you legally bought a copy, sets them on shaky ground under common law. (After all, you have the right to use what you've bought, whether or not you have the right to copy it!) That's what UCITA and its ilk give to Microsoft and its ilk -- the right to restrict use of legally purchased software.
The GPL, on the other hand, is not a contract: it does not ask you to give away any rights, or anything else for that matter. All it does is grant you new rights you did not formerly have -- specifically, the right to copy, modify, and distribute the software under certain circumstances.
You may perceive the GPL's restrictions as limits placed upon your rights -- but they aren't. Outside of a grant of rights by the author (of which the GPL is only one example) you never had the right to copy that software. The GPL grants you a limited right; unlike EULAs, it doesn't ask you to waive any rights you already had.
(In addition, the GPL does not grant a "right to use" the covered software, since it takes it as read that you already have that right by virtue of having legally obtained a copy of the software. The GPL explicitly states that it does not deal with "rights to use".)
Hopefully, seeing actions such as this will help to quell the "RedHat is no better than Microsoft" nonsense. I supose this is a little off topic, but I think RedHat ends up getting the short end of the stick more times than not by the very community that they routinely fight the hardest for.
RFC2119
Exempting open source from mandatory warrantees is good in and of itself, but UCITA also makes legal those nasty Shrink Wrap "end user agreements" (in other words, you will be held to an agreement that you did not sign, nor did you have any say in the wording of that agreement).
UCITA is just bad law, and it is bad news for end users.
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Let me explain why this is a concern. Suppose Company X makes Product A. Company Y competes with company X by making Product A and also makes Product B, which provides the bulk of its income and finances the development of its competitive Product A. Company X can sabotage Company Y by fostering the development of an open source equivalent of Product B so as to cut off the revenue Company Y needs to compete with it (and, perhaps, to survive). Its "air supply" -- to use the word of Microsoft executive Jim Allchin -- has been cut off.
This isn't an abstract example. In the early days of the Windows environment, Microsoft destroyed Quarterdeck, which made DESQview, by giving away a free knock-off of Quarterdeck's QEMM memory management software (which was used to support its GUI and multitasking development). The result: Quarterdeck, without a "cash cow" equivalent to Microsoft's MS-DOS, could not compete. DESQview -- the best multitasking environment available for PCs at the time -- and DESQview/X -- a brilliant GUI based on X Windows -- died because there was no money for their future development.
While Microsoft's free equivalent didn't happen to be open source, it very easily could have been. (In fact, had Microsoft not been rich enough to bankroll its QEMM equivalent itself, it might have been the only practical way to go.) In any event, it always takes much less effort and money to develop a knock-off than the original, because Quarterdeck blazed the trail by developing the technology and feature set, solving all of the knotty technical problems, and dealing with the tradeoffs that are always inherent in new products.
Richard Stallman and others have specifically touted open source as a way of attacking companies they do not like (which, in the case of RMS, includes any company that publishes commercial software -- even those which, unlike Microsoft, act ethically).
To prevent open source from being used in a predatory and unfair manner against them, companies that develop new technology need to patent it. This is precisely what patents are intended to do, and they're especially urgent in an age where open source can be abused to prevent people who honestly advance the state of the art from being deprived of rewards for their labors.
Richard Stallman once told me, personally, that one of his motivations for opposing software patents is that they would make it more difficult for the FSF to "wipe out" (his words) commercial software. Stallman's statement underscores the danger.... And the need for software patents. We might argue about the optimal length of these patents (there are many merits to the argument that 20 years is too long), but few of us with a sense of justice and fairness would say that open source should be allowed to be used as a weapon in a malicious agenda.
If you've heard Bruce speak, or read his writing, you know that he shares some of RMS's animosity toward commercial software companies and frequently rattles his saber, "demanding" that they forfeit their hard work. Could this be the reason he opposes software patents? Just food for thought.
--Brett Glass
I think UCITA is a bad law, and needs to be blocked where it hasn't passed, and repealed where it has. People shouldn't abandon these efforts. In the meantime, let's support RedHat's efforts to keep this carnivorous beast at bay until it's put back in its cage.