Lindows - Where's the Source?

bbh writes: "NewsForge has an article about the Free Software Foundation asking the makers of LindowsOS a simple question, 'Where's the Source?' Lindows CEO Michael Robertson has an interesting take on what the GPL means."

Comments

More GPL theft than you'd think

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the feeling that there's quite a lot of GPL'd code out there being used in products without source being provided. I recently found that my employer (who are large and well-known, and I shall say no more than that) are selling such a product without offering source for download. (I'm posting anonymously cos I want to try to persuade management to talk to the FSF about fixing this. If they refuse, I'm going to have an interesting ethical choice before me...) This product has been on the market for a few years now, and it's not hard to discern the signs of GPL if you're familiar with Free software in general; it just seems that no Slashdotters use it... which seems unlikely.. or, that no-one's been bothered to look for the source, or if they have, that they just shrugged and thought "not my problem." (Incidentally, any suggestions about what I should do if management refuse to publish the source? I don't want to leave except as a last resort... )

Re:More GPL theft than you'd think

[david_bonn]

I'd amend that. There is lots of intellectual property theft in general.

About a dozen years ago, I worked for a small, heartless high-tech startup. The cash money pay was good, my immediate manager was extremely clueless, and the founders and senior management had (for once) greatly overestimated the complexity of the development effort. This made for an extremely leisurely work schedule that (almost) made up for their other obnoxious habits.

My first week there I was writing some code to interpret the logfiles for their product, when I needed to Read the Manual to figure something out. While an MS C Compiler was installed on my peecee, I didn't have copies of the manual and figured they must be around someplace.

Twenty minutes later I discovered that (1) the only copy of the manuals was in the (locked) office of my boss, and (2) there was only one C compiler for about a half-dozen coders. My boss was in meetings all day and didn't want to be disturbed. It was a Friday so I went home before lunch to start my weekend early.

On Monday morning I got the manuals from my boss, fixed the code, and had this entertaining conversation when I returned the manuals:

Me: We need a few more copies of the compilers, at least so more than one coder can read them at a time.

My Boss: We don't have the money for that.

Me: So? We're violating the license agreement. I'd hate to cross MS on something like this.

My Boss: Don't worry, those agreements are impossible to enforce.

I went back to my cube with much to think about. Only a week before, I had signed a fearsome stack of employment agreements with terrifying and nasty language. The employee packet also had an intimidating memo about employee's stealing any company property -- it left me with the impression that I'd end up in jail if I accidentally took a pen home.

... and my boss said that "those kind of agreements are hard to enforce"???

Well, like I said my boss was clueless so I kind of let it slide. But I noticed that for a company with over thirty people, there was only two or three legal copies of any word processing or desktop publishing software around the office. Later that week there was a big dust-up and two of the six engineers quit. In order to patch up the morale a cozy meeting was arranged that friday with the company president, my boss, and the remains of the software group of which I was a part.

At one point I brought up the software license issues:

Me: Y'know, having only one C compiler for four engineers is illegal. We really ought to buy more copies.

President: We'd rather hire really good people than buy software.

Me: So you're saying we should steal to support the company?

President: It isn't really stealing...

Me: I doubt Microsoft would agree with you. What you're doing gives every employee who walks out of here with a beef, like [the two guys who just quit], a way to shut this whole company down.

He didn't know how to answer that. My boss gave me a dirty look. A few weeks later a "working group" was set up, headed by my boss, to identify what software we needed to buy and buy it. This group met weekly for over six months and probably after -- well past when I left the company. As far as I know, they never did spend any actual money correcting the problem.

In the following months I noticed that a fair amount of code in the company's products had also been lifted from various places. Some of it was harmless and easily corrected. Some of it went a long way towards explaining why the company was rather secretive about how it had managed to build its products. I told my boss about it and he basically blew me off by adding it to the list of "issues" (e.g. cases of intellectual property theft) his "working group" was looking at.

I quit after less than six months on the job, taking a well-deserved year being mostly unemployed. The company failed a couple of years later, warmly despised by its ex-employees, customers, and probably anyone else who came into contact with them.

My boss was probably more clueless than average, but I don't think crap like this is at all uncommon.

How do you fight this silliness?

If you are into persuasion, I'd try an argument that goes something like this:

We're a technology company. Our primary assets are intangible. One of those assets is the intellectual property represented by the source code to the software we sell. Putting a dollar value on any such software is highly subjective and very vulnerable to perception, both positive and negative. We want to avoid any negative impressions which might cause difficulties, in particular during a due diligence process such as during an acquisition, business partnership, or when raising money from investors.

Probably the best approach is pretty gentle. Make friends with some people in your accounting department. If you've already got a friend there, so much the better. Tell your friend about this problem, emphasizing what it might do to the company's stock price or how much trouble it might make during an acquisition. People tend to lend more credence to information from someone they know than from some person they never met who comes to them with a story of gloom and doom. Unfortunately, this becomes a lot harder in a larger company.

A less discreet approach might be to write a nice memo on paper on the above themes, print it out and sign and date it. Keep a copy for yourself, give a copy to your boss, and give a copy to your CFO or VP of Finance. Emphasize that these kind of intellectual property violations could cause problems with the value of the company or the company's products.

A final approach is to discreetly contact your company's auditors. Auditors have a bad rap right now and are hence pretty stuffy about any iffy situations. They are involved in assigning a value to any assets a company has (like software that might have a license violation) and they will probably be very interested in what you have to say. This can make quite a bit of trouble for your company if you aren't sure it can be fixed easily, so be a bit careful with this approach. However, it is less of an escalation than going public with the embarassing information.

GPL is GPL

[Cato]

It's not about whining, it's about sticking to what the GPL requires. IANAL, but I understand that when you distribute the binary of a GPLed program (such as Linux), you must also distribute the source code (or make it available, e.g. via the Net). If this is not acceptable to Lindows, they should have chosen another OS with a more permissive license, e.g. one of the BSDs. They can't have the developer base and mindshare of Linux without doing what the GPL requires.

If Lindows had licensed a commercial software component and were breaking its license terms, would that be a 'silly question'? For some reason, conforming to open source licenses is considered by some people to be an optional extra...

The only real issue IMO is whether some delay is acceptable between releasing the binary and the source, particularly for betas - this seems to happen with some projects, in practice, but if the project/business goes away in the mean time, the users are left without the source.

Damn I hope I'm wrong...

[MadFarmAnimalz]

but I have one word for this chap: LEECH.

I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when I came across:

Kword repackaged as Wordpublisher

and other rebadged stuff

Major credibility plunge there. Not to judge the rest of the package, but it looks more like they're just grepping through the source for places where they can splash the words lindows and/or Michael Robertson. No value added.

Like I said, leech.

Hmmm

[jgerman]

Robertson seems dismayed by the FSF's attempt to enforce the GPL. "No wonder there's virtually no healthy Linux companies. The community seems to attack them when the real focus should be elsewhere."

So what's he trying to say here, we shlould ignore gpl violations because they're on our side? No. That's a good bit of the reason we don't like MS. They bend the rules for those on their side, admittedly they use strongarm tactics to force companies into it, but that's beside the point.

In a related story...

[bokmann]

I recently took a new car out for a test drive. While I was going 75 miles an hour in a 35 mph zone, a cop pulled me over. I told the cop, "Officer, I am just testing this car for it applicability to my lifestyle. Once I complete the process and agree to buy this car, I will comply with all applicable laws."

Parallels with MP3.COM

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Robertson blew hundreds of millions of IPO dollars while at MP3.COM because of one simple, arrogant, mistake. He thought that by using a program to remotely verify your physical possession of a CD, that he could then make MP3's of the songs on that CD available to you online in a "virtual locker."

Indeed, this is a great idea and it was long overdue. But, that is not the way copyright law works in this country. Robertson was overconfident that the law would be no hindrence to his business plan, and thus ignored it -- at his peril. The copyright industry took MP3.COM to court over the service and won, they won bigtime. MP3.COM ended up blowing over half their IPO wad on just the pay-offs of the Big5 in the copyright industry. At $25,000 per song per copy maximum fines that $200M was actually a huge discount. But, come on man, a $200M mistake is a huge mistake nonetheless.

Fast foward to today. MP3.COM has sold out to Vivdeni-Universal and Robertson made out like a bandit on the sale. Now, here he is working on a very good idea, an idea whose time is longer overdue. But he is ignoring the law AGAIN because he doesn't think it should apply to his special case because what he is doing is so ground breaking.

Now, I am not saying that the GPL is equivalent of the RIAA bandits. But if Robertson weren't quite so gung-ho-with-blinders-on he might have made MP3.COM a true force for topling the copyright industry as was once his battle cry. Instead he sold out and the dream was killed. If he continues to follow true to form, he is going to end up adding little to nothing to the Libre Software community and may end up harming it in the process.

Grow up Mike, you should have learned your lesson the first time around. Ignore the rules at your own peril.