Culture Clash: SCO, OpenLinux, Linus And The GPL

hobsonchoice writes "SCO has issued a letter saying SCO Linux customers won't be sued. The same does not seem to apply if using a non-SCO distribution such as RedHat." LightSail points to the SCO letter itself, and raises an interesting point: "If they approve the use of 'their' IP in Linux in a single kernel, then the GPL holds that IP SCO allows to be used by a select few must be freely released to any and all. It appears that all Linux users everywhere were just given a license to continued use of Linux even if SCO would win their suit with IBM." And Haikuu writes "eWeek recently posted an interview conducted by e-mail exchange with Linus Torvalds regarding his recent move to the OSDL and the SCO suit."

Comments

IP != Copyright

[DarkMan]

From the header: If they approve the use of 'their' IP in Linux in a single kernel, then the GPL holds that IP SCO allows to be used by a select few must be freely released to any and all. It appears that all Linux users everywhere were just given a license to continued use of Linux even if SCO would win their suit with IBM.

No, emphatically not.

GPL applies to copyright'ed materials only. If SCO have other form of IP protection (such as patent, or, as they in fact claim, trade secret) the the GPL does not even interact with it. And see below.

Further, it is possible for SCO to liscence their copyrighted code such that all thier customers may use it. That does not make it GPL'd.

The GPL only applies upon redistribution - it is quite valid for me to link in code written under any sort of liscence to the Linux kernel. However, I may not freely redistribute it unless I can meet all the restrictions on it. From the GPl, section 7:

If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.

Granted, it is talking principly in terms of patent liscencing, but that's inconsequential.

As a case in point, conside the NVIDIA binary drivers. If you have an NVIDIA card, you have a liscence to use that copyrighted code. You do not have a liscence to re-distribute NVIDIA's code. Yet you may link the two systems together, just fine, provided you don't try to redistribute the combined work.

Now, SCO redistributing binaries from their ftp site, _after_ they make claims about thier code being in Linux is a whole different kettle of fish. That's a different issue however.

Re:SCO Letter

[MrGrendel]

They seem to have removed all of the kernels, at least in every place I looked. But they aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. From the file kernel-source-2.4.19.SuSE-106.nosrc.rpm (notice that they removed the source from the source rpm -- I confirmed that). But there are quite a few patches left. Inside patches.tar.bz is the file 020_rcu-poll. To quote...

+ * Read-Copy Update mechanism for mutual exclusion
+ *
+ * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+ * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

and a little farther down is

+ * Copyright (c) International Business Machines Corp., 2001
+ *
+ * Author: Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com>
+ *
+ * Based on the original work by Paul McKenney <paul.mckenney@us.ibm.com>
+ * and inputs from Andrea Arcangeli, Rusty Russell, Andi Kleen etc.

What have you got to say for yourselves now, dumbasses? This may not contain the exact stuff that they're all worked up about (although it sounds like they want to claim RCU entirely), but it is a patch for source that does contain the offending material and therefore a derivative work.

Re:SCO Letter

[ocelotbob]

The source is still on the server, only its location is obfuscated a bit. It seems to me that the move to remove the kernel is just an issue of trying to appear that they've been irreparably damaged. I'd offer to diff from the mainstream kernel myself, but I'm on my laptop which has a tiny, tiny amount of storage space.