The FSF, Linux's Hit Men

PrimeNumber writes "Forbes has this story about the Free Software Foundation and its quest for Cisco and Broadcom to release the source of GPL'ed linux source used in routers. Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this. However it did help me gain insight into software from a PHB and suit perspective."

Comments

Forbes is a Microsoft shill anyway

[Kiaser Zohsay]

The last several Forbes articles that even mentioned Linux were just plain old bashing.

Now, maybe I'll RTFA.

Re:Forbes is a Microsoft shill anyway

[Glass of Water]

No need to RTFA, it's pure FUD.

A summary, if you like: beware of using this software (which thousands of people have developed and give away for free) because you might have to actually honor the license that comes with the software! Imagine that.

Re:Forbes is a Microsoft shill anyway

[EchoMirage]

Forbes is a Microsoft shill anyway ...so no need to worry about what they say, as all the corporate and business types who read this know this too, and are vividly aware of the licensing fights going on, and are anti-Microsoft themselves, and are vividly aware that Cisco is doing a bad thing and that those poor kids in the FSF are really getting portrayed in a bad light.

Yeah, real good attitude. Keep ignoring Forbes: it's that mentality that keeps Forbes readers ignoring Linux and free software.

The free software community really needs to understand that when you're the underdog, you want to ALWAYS be portraying yourself in the best light possible and holding your head up high, even when people take really cheap shots at you. If the free software movement keeps miring itself in the mud and digging in its heels, it's going to continue to have a very difficult time growing.

Great quote:

[Saint Aardvark]

In some ways, these Free Software Foundation "enforcement actions" can be more dangerous than a typical copyright spat, because usually copyright holders seek money--say, royalties on the product that infringing companies are selling. But the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties -- it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners.

1) Hah! Let's try:

@companies = ("Microsoft", "IBM", "Oracle", "SCO");

foreach (@companies) {
$quote =~ s/Free Software Foundation/$_/g;
}

There has been more than one story about Microsoft and IBM using licensing or patent disputes in order to screw competitors. SCO's entire existence seems to depend on wanting you "to burn down your own house". Oracle's in there for completeness. I'm sure there's other examples.

2) And holy FSOF, since when did complying with the license the software is released under become such an onerous act? When it forbids you to release benchmarks of .NET software (MS)? When it includes clauses saying "If you're in Europe, and you have the right to reverse engineer this software, you explicitly give up that right even though you don't have to" (Synplicity or Matlab, I forget which -- installed recently at work)? Evidently these crack-induced clauses are perfectly acceptable; why, then, does Forbes' writer swallow a camel and strain at a gnat?

Grr, this is going to bug me all day...

Re:Great quote:

[Jason Earl]

Exactly. The reason that Linksys was able to sell 400,000 units is that they stole a jump on their competitors by using Free Software as the base of their product. They didn't write that software and the license that Linux is distributed under is very explicit. Linksys sold nearly a half million units of a product that someone else did the bulk of the work developing and now they want to complain about the terms?

That's just ridiculous.

The reason that Cisco is going to settle is that they know that if they didn't settle they would lose,be forced to cough up the source code, and pay damages to boot. They are fortunate that they stole from the FSF and not someone else.

Re:Great quote:

[fermion]

This is real interesting because I would think Forbes would be pro IP. For instance, do they support the RIAA? I guess they do not. Music for all practical intents and purposes is free. If someone buys music, it is out of a respect for laws and various contracts that says we buy goods and services. We have always been able to get music for free, it is just easier now. The fact that music sales have remained as high as they have, in spite of music being freely available, in spite of the RIAA attacking customers and potential customers, in spite of the economy being in such a slump that many people have no money.

And does Forbes believe in EULA that says you must have a license for each machine or each processor? I guess not. After all, the consequences to businesses for violating these agreements are extreme. A company with several PCs and lacking a single license for the MS software could be a great deal of trouble. And the gestapo tactics of the BSA audits and spy software certainly cannot be good a corporation.

Many of these adults remind me so much of adolescents who want to pick and choose the rules. The GPL is disclosed up front and a person chooses to use the GPL code or not. If they choose to used it and violate the license, there are consequences, just like any other violation. It is childish to say after the fact that the rules are unfair. The rules were agreed to when the software was used. And unlike some other software or music licenses, there is no element of constraint or duress, and the GPL has no element of unreasonable restrictions of rights.

The fact is that corporations want others to pay for their worthless products, but refuse the same in return. We have seen this with the RIAA and expensive industry reports. I have seen this with guys make 100K a year but only go to movies when they are free. And we see this know with companies that steal code but complain when others do the same.

I'm a zealot

[wazzzup]

[Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this.]

I only read what I want to hear and ignore others perspectives, right or wrong.

Re:WTF?

[aborchers]

Here's what I sent Forbes via their comment function:

I'd like to be diplomatic, but the tone of this article is just ridiculous.

Since when is it an onerous act to expect a licensee to comply with the terms of the license? These companies used GPL-protected code and then wanted to balk at the license by not distributing the changes as required. How is that different from a software purchaser deciding it is acceptable to copy and redistribute proprietary software protected by a more "traditional" license?

While it may be an affront to the proprietary software industry's ways of doing business, the GPL is a sound contract that anyone is free to accept or reject as conditions for use of the protected software. The payment for receiving the "free" GPL software is that modifications must be released back to benefit the public. If that isn't acceptable, then these companies should not use GPL code and should either create or purchase another operating system.

Spare us the "comrade" and "dark side" nonsense. This is a simple contract dispute based on U.S. copyright law. Your mockery of it reflects poorly on your journalistic credibility.

GPL benefits companies like Cisco

[Cesare Ferrari]

The really odd thing is that the defence of the GPL licence will ultimately benefit companies like Cisco if they played the game correctly. These are commodity items, routers, switches etc. By moving to a GPL software base they reduce cost, risk in producing the software for their products, and then can concentrate on the value added parts. Config tools, reliability etc. For example, take the disputed Linksys router. I would have expected Linksys to have plenty ways of defending their product from competition rather than withholding the GPL updates (design rights, patents, trademarks etc). Ok, so it looks like they have messed up in this case with the way they have written their driver, but that shouldn't cloud the fact that *if* they had correctly written their driver they would be able to keep it proprietry.

Skip reading this?

[shaka999]

Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this

Does this statement strike anyone else as idiotic? If someone doesn't agree with "the community" we just ignore them? Talk about sticking your head in the sand.

Re:Daniel Lyons

[Marcus Erroneous]

The original article was interesting enough. Protecting your IP in order to make money is okay, protecting your IP not to make money is not. Then you read "What SCO wants, SCO gets" and you see the same theme. It's okay to sue the pants off of someone in the name of greed, or to attack someone for failing to live up to your licensing agreements when it costs you money, but the upholding of the license on legal grounds without greed as the fundamental motive is unAmerican and wrong? WTF?
Either a license is legal and a company has the right to enforce the terms that were entered into, or it's not. Either it's okay to rip off someones IP or it's not. The idea that it's okay to rip off someone elses IP if you're going to make a buck is hollow.
Then again, these guys thought Enron was wonderful. Forbes isn't targeting the type of person that is furthering the world, just themselves. What I find really sad is that the author completely skips over the fact that companies can develop internal applications based on GPLcode then deploy and use them enterprise wide without paying the onerous licensing fees that would normally be required by proprietary software. That would save a lot of businesses a lot of money, improving their margins and boosting profits and bonuses. I don't think that it would really be against Forbes targetted readership to have an article that shows both sides of the issue. If you use it to sell a product based on GPL you have obligations that you don't normally take into account and that you might well decide are too steep for you. That's an informed business decision for you to make. And, that same software deployed internally you can keep to yourself and still save a bundle on licensing costs. Again, another informed business decision.
It's not outside of Forbe's scope to present a balanced article to help its readership make informed decisions. They miss the point that the GPL is about allowing businesses to have more options in the tools that they use to conduct business. It's all about lowering costs, being more efficient and freeing you to spend less money while keeping more of what you make. And that truly is what business is about.

My Feedback

[Outland Traveller]

The sour slant of this article and its sympathy towards intellectual property theft does great harm to the integrity of Forbes Magazine.

The GPL license is very clear and up-front in its terms and conditions, and is far more permissive than traditional copyright licenses. However it does state clearly that if you do not abide by the limited restrictions it does enforce, you cannot distribute the covered work.

This article, in the face of all reason, appears to suggest that readers should feel sympathy for companies who break copyright law by distributing copyrighted works without ahering to the terms of the copyright license.

Furthermore, the article goes on to lambast the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit watchdog group, for attempting to enforce its own copyrights.

The author ludicrously justifies his hostility towards the FSF by stating that the FSF is more "dangerous" than other businesses holding copyrights, because it is insists that violators of its copyright stop distributing its covered works.

The FSF is also derided for apparantly having a limited budget, as if its limited funds are somehow justification for others to violate its copyrights.

The FSF are referred to using terms associated with communist propaganda, which add nothing to the intellectual quality of the article.

The language the article uses appears to make the FSF appear suspicious and nefarious for attempting to come to an amicable resolution with other companies before seeking legal protection.

Finally, the article ends with the authors opinion that it is a "pity" that companies will settle with the FSF when they are caught distributing covered works without a license, instead of going to court.

If this is the kind of article one can expect to find in Forbes these days, I don't know how much longer I will be a reader.

Re:Of course!

[NightSpots]

The problem is that the engineers are deciding that Linux is a great way to save time and money in embedded environments without realizing that the viral nature of the GPL is going to screw their company.

As the story mentions, the BSD licensed products provide an easy alternative without the licensing issues. It just takes an awareness of the options to realize that using Linux in the first place is a silly idea for commercial products.

Still worth a read

[nanojath]

Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this.

I'd suggest it is very important to read this. I think it's a bit simplistic to say that Forbes is a "Microsoft shill." Rather, Forbes is heavily invested in the status quo of business circa the early 21st century, and is naturally threatened (and apparently not a little confused) by open source and what it represents.

Anyone who bothers to give it a little thought realizes that in the modern economic system, the wealth of the 5% that own 85% of everything is protected by a business environment where the barriers of entry are too high to permit the appearance of significant competition from below. Every once in a while, emerging technologies can be harnessed to create an Apple or a Microsoft to challenge the more traditional, say, IBM.

Now, it's plain enough that we among the 95% are largely responsible for all of this wealth getting shuffled around. We do the work, we buy the products. Our retirement plans sit around for 40 years, a nice capital base in the market while the fat cats try to speculate their way to another billion. In general, we aren't able to muster sufficient organization or marshall enough of our resources together to have a conscious, guided effect on these things.

It's little surprise, then, that Forbes falls back on the rhetoric of Communism and revolution to characterize the Open Source movement, because it represents a similar kind of threat to that system. Labor unions, for example, represent an attempt to collectivize the theoretical power of a group (workers are required for business to be done, workers can choose to see themselves in a collective bargaining position opposite those that own the business) to shift the balance of power between labor and management. Communism represents the attempt to acheive this reordering on the national scale through conventional political means (democratic processes and conquest). Open source has succeeded up to this point by a similar route - harnessing the distributed power of a group of individuals to achieve results normally available only to major players.

Unlike these things, though, while the Open Source "movement" may be informed by an ideology, the integrity of its product is maintained by an adherence to the strictly capitalist, legal definition of intellectual property. What is truly offensive to the Forbes set is that the grubby horde would have the audacity to coopt one of THEIR legal power tools to create a product that nakedly opposes the dynamics of the status quo.

The basic argument of this article, if you strip away the snide asides about the irony of those open source commies suing people for violating their I.P. just like regular businessmen, fercryin'outloud, is that by legally defending it's licenses, the Open Source community will discourage people who don't wish to abide by those licenses from adopting software released under them. Uh, yes, that is correct, sir. Businesses which wish to develop proprietary technologies with closed source software should not use GPL code.

Is Forbes genuinely incapable of understanding that the whole point of Open Source is that it represents a parallel software development strategy that is opposed to the conventional business paradigm of proprietary I.P., or are they engaged in conscious propaganda in defense of the status quo? In the end it doesn't matter, the result is the same. The principle of open source licensed software is a genuine economic threat to the conventional I.P. business paradigm, but it is completely impotent if the licenses are not enforced. So I'd say, don't skip this article - study it carefully and learn the strategy of your oponents.

Quite.

[BadDoggie]

Hence my letter to the editor at Forbes, with the headline "One-sided outrage?":

Where's Mr Lyons' outrage at the Gestapo-like tactics of Micrsoft's and the BSA's software license enforcement? The city of Virginia Beach had to waste the time of 50 employees and ended up paying $129,000 for software they'd already paid for but couldn't match up the paperwork. Microsoft tries for force its resellers to act as their licensing police and turn in their customers who may or may not be fully compliant.

Closed-source software licenses boil down to "You have no rights to source code, no rights to fix or modify the software in any way, no rights to use the software in any way the licensor doesn't approve of and no rights to incorporate it in any other works. You have no recourse if the software doesn't work and you have no right of first sale."

In contrast, the GPL boils down to: "Here's the source code. You can use it if you want but then you must make it and your derivatives based on it available to the public. If you don't agree to these terms, you can write the entire code yourself."

Another firm has been caught stealing software and violating licensing terms but in this case, enforcing the software license is somehow bad. Comrade, indeed. I should just ignore some company stealing and using my code as their own.

IBM and Oracle, among others, understand how to work on and with Linux. They sell proprietary software which runs on Linux and many other platforms. In order to keep their source code closed, they write much of their own interface code rather than incorporating the work of others which would then force them to open their own under the licensing agreements. At the same time, IBM has more than 100 programmers actively writing open source code for Linux. One division of IBM can't use the work of another division because of the licensing concerns, and IBM has no problem with this. Lyons does, somehow.

Cisco paid $500 million for Linksys. Which part of the sale gives them the right to ignore all previous contractual obligations? The phrase is "due diligence", and Forbes has had quite a bit to say about this in the past (e.g., http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1030/6612184s1.h tml).

That Forbes sees fit to publish this sort of irresponsible, Microsoft party-line FUD is the reason I let my subscription lapse a few years ago.

Re:Quite.

[Erioll]

You're right, but you missed one of the most disturbing parts IMO.

From the article:

In some ways, these Free Software Foundation "enforcement actions" can be more dangerous than a typical copyright spat, because usually copyright holders seek money--say, royalties on the product that infringing companies are selling. But the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners.

This basically means that "It's alright to do whatever you want, and infringe on anybody's stuff, as long as you pay them off at the end. Asking them to stop, or comply with the way the code was released is bad, because nothing should be free." This is disturbing in and of itself.

Erioll

Re:Of course!

[gaijin99]

And naturally, though the word "viral" didn't actually appear in the article, they did bring up the dread "oooh, the GPL is viral" line of crap.

What I've never understood is how people can object to the "viral" GPL, yet have no objection to propriatary licenses, which are equally viral. Linksys needed an OS for their router. They could have paid SCO huge bux for the rights to the Unix source. Presumably MS has its source available for embedded apps, also at high prices. Had they chosen to use SCO's Unix they not only could have kept their changes secret, the license would have required that they do so. So the secrecy license scheme is also "viral".

Modifying GPLed code is an exchange, just as much as using non-GPLed code is. With non-GPL stuff, you exchange money for code. With the GPL you exchange access to your changes for code. What is with this pathetic whining: "But we wanted to keep our changes secret." If you want to keep your changes secret either build your own damn OS, or license one of the propriatary ones by paying lots of money. The FSF is about exchanging access to code for access to code, not about giving away code

More to the point, of course the FSF sues people who violate their license, just as MS and SCO sue those who violate their license. Likewise, the FSF thinks that its system is superior and would like to see it supplant the propriatary system. Why is this bad? MS and SCO certainly would like to see their system prevail. Apparently, Forbes can't stand to see actual competition...

Revolting 'Article'!

[Chordonblue]

Nowhere in this article is it mentioned that the people who choose to use GPL code are obligated by the rules of the license - it's not as if this is somehow hidden from public view. The author of the article treats the FSF and the GPL as if they play some sort of 'gotcha!' game. Nothing could be further from the truth. The GPL was designed by people who hated the thought of being ensnared by proprietary software - a real 'gotcha' if there ever was one. The way GPL code got to so usable and stable was because it was shared by design!

Why not focus on the fact that these criminal corporations are STEALING from thousands of individual contributors of GPL code worldwide? Linksys didn't code what they're using and they're not even being asked to PAY for it! The bargain is - they need to share what they've modified - end of story. The FSF has an obligation to stand up for the 'little guy' because... Well... Who else would? You can bet that if I took a piece of Cisco router code and put it in a "Chordsoft Router" they'd sue me for everything I had - and rightly so. I deserve to be sued for using proprietary software under their license agreement. Can't hack the terms of the agreement? Simple. DON'T USE IT!

The FSF was doing things 'in secret' - not for some dark motive, but because they didn't want to make a specticle out of corporations they are in negotiations with. Contrast this behavior with the BSA who routinely lines up companies and individuals for public inspection. Ask Ernie Ball (music manufacturer) about it sometime.

But everyone in the industry knows that GPL'd code - particularly network kernel stuff is the best there is. With so many eyes viewing, fixing, modifying, and tweaking it, it's as perfect as perfect gets. It's also very tempting for companies like Lineo and Linksys to appropriate it because it's so easy to do. But when you do the crime, shouldn't you do the time?

And pardon me, but I don't see $65,000 as a big settlement - these are reasonable costs associated with having to do this research in the first place. It's certainly not like when you have organizations like the BSA demanding MILLIONS for violations of their copyright holders.

How about a little more balance Forbes? Truly horrible 'reporting'.