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SCC Statement on SELinux Patent Issues
Hawke writes "Secure Computing has
announced a
Statement of Assurance that they will not use the patents in question to limit the availability of SELinux. They continue to say: 'However, Secure Computing does not extend the Assurance to software that merely interoperates with SELinux, or is merely included with a distribution of SELinux.'" The original story was here.
In their Statment of Assurance, they specifically allow that they may license, sell or re-assign any or all rights to a third party, who is not and would not be bound by the Statement of Assurance.
Basically this means that the parts of SELinux that they have a patent on, are free of licensing restrictions, so long as the distribution continues to be SELinux (you are free to modify it and re-distribute under the same name) and so long as they have not reassigned those rights on the patent to a third party.
Forgive me if I seem a bit less than touched by the assurance, but this assurance seems to me to be exceedingly self serving, and no assurance of anything.
-Rusty
You never know...
Last year in a show of how easy it was to disrupt and abuse the patent process by registering a common, every-day idea a Melbourne lawyer patented a "circular transportation facilitation device" with more info on the story here, here(pdf file), and here
Obviously it's too easy to get things patented these days, especially in areas of high technology as few if any patent officer workers are well versed in the areas of technology. Most of the patent office stampers would have little inclination as to how an intigrated circuit works or if an item of software recently designed is any different or unique from any other piece of similar software.
Sure, it's nice to be able to patent and protect your inventions and innovations, but when most of today's patent holders are larger corporations, it's hardly meant to protect the garage inventor anymore.
So I'm a pervert. Welcome to the Internet.
So, let's see - an operating system produced by the NSA, with the threat of future patent claims on its core technology.
Please don't start this again. Paranoia over the nation's most powerful spy agency aside, Security Enhanced Linux has introduced a myriad of useful security ideas into the Linux world. SELinux uses type enforcement and role-based access control to secure the operating system from the ground up; instead of relying on applications to perform their own security, SELinux ensures that programs only have access to the system resources that they SHOULD have, and nothing more.
Furthermore, a presentation of SELinux by NSA officials at the 2.5 Linux Kernel Summit in March 2001 spurred Linus to propose an idea that has come to be the Linux Security Module, which will hopefully make it's way into the 2.5 kernel eventually. Under this system, and security module, not just SELinux, can be quickly loaded into the Linux kernel to provide whatever kind of security the user desires.
The fact that SCC has issued this statement, however cryptic, is a huge step in the right direction for the Linux world, and perhaps the entire UNIX world. It ensures the current development of SELinux by the NSA and its contributers, and allows Linux users to employ one of the more secure operating system implementations out there.
The National Security Agency has been making good strides towards making better public relations, and SELinux would appear to be a good weapon in giving them a better public image. If still paranoid, just download the source and view it yourself; it's not huge, and it's very clean-cut and understandable.
Its actually useless. It allows them to sell it to a friend, sue everyone and buy their patent back one afternoon. The exemption excludes authorizing applicaitons or protocols (ie everything NSALinux does)
Utterly cynical. However it demonstrates how bad the US patent problem is. Even the NSA, the US ultimate investigative and spook agency can't get patent stuff sane. So now the US government has written a security system that only foreign governments can profit from due to bad USSA law and poor planning.
Its a pity Americans don't understand irony...
Simple answer - No.
The USA is the only country with such ill educated government officials