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OSDL Releases Q&A on SCO Legal Actions
craigoda writes "OSDL released a Q&A today written by Lawrence Rosen, noted expert on technology and intellectual property law. The Q&A points to serious flaws in SCO's claims that end-users have to pay for Linux licenses." The press release is a little more diplomatic, saying that the document only helps one determine whether or not one should buy a license from SCO.
OSDL released a Q&A today written by Lawrence Rosen, noted expert on technology and intellectual property law. The Q&A points to serious flaws in SCO's claims that end-users have to pay for Linux licenses." The press release is a little more diplomatic, saying that the document only helps one determine whether or not one should buy a license from SCO.
Oooh! I don't have to read the article, I am going to guess... NO! Anyone who purchases a license from SCO is either extremely paranoid, or a moron. Granted, I would be paranoid too with the ammount of money that these lawsuits are generating.
The real question is will Al Franken defeat the "Fair and Balanced" Fox News.
http://use.perl.org
if I bought a copy of Red Hat and it contained illegal code, there is no way I would even begin to consider paying SCO for the illegal code. Either Red Hat would pay SCO or Red Hat would refund my money and I would stop using the product.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Obviously, the employees at SCO read slashdot. With so much, perhaps unfounded, speculation going on at slashdot about insider trading, perhaps it's a good time to point out to our SCO readership the Insider Trading Bounty program. If there are any transactions going on by insiders that isn't listed here or here, the SEC, and slashdot, would like to know!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I read the Q&A and it doesn't seem like it's written for us, the poeple that understand what is truely going on.
But, it is written for all the bosses out there that are scared with what is going on. My boss is worried about this whole thing because of a major prodoct that we are releasing that will run on a Linux server. He is concerned that if SCO wins, can we still use Linux.
I for one am going to be sending him this Q&A.
Like I said, we all understand that SCO is full of crap, but our bosses don't.
Ok, SCO wants to take it to court. They believe the power of the GNU & Linux projects are in the terms of the License agreement. What they do not understand is that the power of Opensource is in the people commited to opensource. Law exists to serve the populous, and maintain fairness. If SCO wants to challenge the fairness of what we (opensource supporters) have determined to be fair, then lets challenge back. Please visit Bapudi.com and post to the bulletin board in support of boycotting SCO. After we collect your posts, we will mail out our boycot postings to remind SCO that challenging the ideals of opensource is more than just detrimental to opensource, it will be suicide for thier business.
Quite simple.
The secondary element to this whole clusterfuck is that SCO is threatening to sue individual businesses and individual distributors of Linux unless they pay SCO licensing fees. If Linux is covered under the GPL, then SCO cannot legally force anybody to pay them license fees. It's against the GPL.
However, if the GPL is a legally invalid license, then SCO is released from that restraint. They can go to whomever and invalidate a potential license-purchaser's argument of protection under the GPL and have a stronger legal threat to extort^H^H^H^H^H^Hcollect license fees.
Of course, Rosen is absolutely correct that the courts would be exceptionally unlikely to allow SCO to claim damages from individual users of Linux *and* from IBM.
Disclaimer: IANAL
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
...is that when this is all over, all we will remember is that 'SCO were a bunch of scumbags'. Nobody'll say, 'Misters Such And Such formerly from SCO are a bunch of scumbags'. They'd virtually get off scott free as far as their reputation with the general (Slashdot) goes. They could set up a new company that does something that gets a headline and we're all full of praise, without even knowing it's the same people.
As right now.
As I am a big subscriber to conspiracy theory, I have to admit that it seems awefully nice of the community to continue to point out the strong and weak points of the whole SCO mess. What firm wouldn't kill to be able to cruise along with a bit of PR each day to fuel the fire and get people to view the story from a thousand different angles - making it that much easier to plug those holes and stand in court....
Not that SCO has much of chance, it just seems intersting that pretty much everyone who is anyone (including myself now) has had to drop their two cents in the bucket regarding the case.
This guy doesn't completely answer the indemnity problems that arise from the SCO lawsuit. Yes, it doesn't look like users are going to be in trouble from SCO, even if SCO wins this thing. But that doesn't totally answer the question.
If you're a big company, say Citibank, and you're considering whether or not to use Linux, or ANY open source or free software for that matter, (including sendmail, bind, etc), you have to consider what the risk is that someone has slipped code into the software that is under intellectual property restrictions. Take, for example, a patent. Suppose someone puts a challenge response antispam system into sendmail. Right or wrong, mailblocks claims to own the patent on that type of system. Mailblocks is not a party to the agreement between sendmail.org and Citibank, and they see that Citibank is infringing on their patent without a license. Mailblocks can sue Citibank for patent infringement, and Citibank doesn't have anyone to go to in order to complain because there is no indemnification provided by the license to use sendmail.
The indemnification problem is NOT specific to the SCO case. But looking at the case points out that there is a general problem. It means that anyone who uses free/open-source software has to consider the additional risk of potentially getting sued into oblivion by some unknown 3rd party with a patent portfolio.
And before you think I'm making this up, read this.
I don't have an answer for this, short getting rid of software patents. Some please tell me there's another way to see this.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Now I wait for Stallman to put a price on my head for not only calling the Hurd Linux, but also for not calling it GNU/Hurd and GNU/Linux. :)
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Right. But if their argument stopped here, all of the owners of original Linux code would have the right to sue SCO into the ground for violating their copyright anyways -- except that we'd have the right to sue them starting with their first distribution of Linux code.
The only way around that would be to say that anything put under the GPL was actually put into the public domain. Once it's in the public domain, SCO would be able to do anything that they want with the code -- including asking for further license fees.
On the other hand, this would also mean that -- since their code was distributed by them (with their knowledge) under the GPL license, IT would be public domain as well... and they wouldn't have any legal force behind a request for more money..
In other words, the worst case of this argument would be that all of Linux (including the SCO code) is public domain, and nobody has to pay anybody for any of it. (but SCO would be free to relicense it in the future).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I don't think the paper addressed the question that if in fact SCO's proprietary code got into Linux, how that necessarily means IBM did it. Wouldn't there have to be evidence shown in the form of SCO source code vs IBM contributed source code, belonging to SCO, as being the same? Even then, it would only take about a few weeks before SCO published the specific code, already in Linux and fixes were made to exclude the code...invalidating the whole concept of a license. Its not a fine for using linux, its a license of SCO's proprietary code. Next: Does SCO have the right to sell licenses to code they may not own? Through their own propaganda, they think so...if this is the case and we all flock to buy SCO licenses, could we file a class action suit against SCO for our money back because SCO never owned the code? I could imagine my ass getting sued if i sold the rights to the rolling stones catalogue to some gulliable moron...
issue a press release to keep the soap opera
going. It is quite typical of them to outdo
their previous nonsense with even greater nonsense.
And if this shift the talk away from the main
issue, which is PROOF, then it is a good strategy.
These people have to show us proof before they
are allowed to open their mouth again.