RMS Cuts Through Some SCO FUD

sckienle writes "ZD-Net has a commentary by Richard Stallman about the SCO case against IBM, kind of. It does provide some history on what the GNU organization did to protect itself from such lawsuits. Favorite quote: 'Less evident is the harm it does by inciting simplistic thinking: [Intellectual Property] lumps together diverse laws--copyright law, patent law, trademark law and others--which really have little in common.'"

Comments

Who cares if Linux has SCO owned code?

[mofochickamo]

However, I can address the broader issue of such situations. In a community of over half a million developers, we can hardly expect that there will never be plagiarism. But it is no disaster; we discard that material and move on. If there is material in Linux that was contributed without legal authorization, the Linux developers will learn what it is and replace it.

While SCO's claims are certainly annoying, they don't pose much of a threat to the open source community since the code in question (if it exists and is ever revealed) can be removed.

Re:Linux no longer essential

[TrekkieGod]

I mean, reading his comments it seems clear that his purpose was not to defend Linux, but to try to draw a distinction (surprise) between the Linux kernel, the GNU system and the OS that is GNU/Linux.

I don't think he cares about the lawsuit at all...he's just using a visible issue to see if people will pay attention to the same old stuff he's always blabbing about, but no one cares anymore. He barely mentions the SCO issue...

I think the article description says it all: commentary by Richard Stallman about the SCO case against IBM, kind of.

Re:Linux no longer essential

[jo42]

> doesn't warrant Stallman's endless ranting over naming

Beg to differ. "Linux" is the kernel, not the whole OS, or distribution.