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OSDL Releases New Paper on SCO's Claims
Ridgelift writes "The Open Source Development Labs have released a paper entitled SCO: Without Fear and Without Research [PDF, HTML version at the FSF] where Eben Moglen debunks SCO's claims to copyright infringement, and also discusses how they contradict themselves by citing that the GPL is both invalid and provides them legal protection. More information at the OSDL site and via an Internet.com article."
For those of you that choose not to RTFA:
"SCO is full of shit. And oh yeah, Darl has got balls of steel."
SCO claim that there's a non compete clause in their contract with Novell, and hence, Novell may not compete with SCO.
Now, I don't see Novell running around like a madman shitting in their own bathwater and suing everyone who says "boo". Clear evidence that Novell is in no way competing with SCO's core business.
Ok Whens the courtdate? i want to be present. I am dead serious. I am tired of SCO, and i want to see them disbanded.
SimonTek
They are making all the right people mad, just like the Sex Pistols and some certain colonists before them (Boston Tea Party anyone?).
The question is, will anyone remember SCO in 5 years to mention them in the same breath as innovators like Samuel Adams and Sid Vicious? Or are they doomed to VH1 "Where are they now" type obscurity. I would hope for the former, because there is no question that what they are doing is important, and needs to be remembered.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I was wondering when I'd get my SCO fix for the day.
From Gartner's comments last week, it becomes clear that SCO's claims, press-releases and lawsuits are damaging the adoption of Linux, in the short-term, in corporate environments. I believe that is, partially, what RedHat's case against SCO is about.
So when do we expect that axe to fall? With the IBM case going into Oral arguments next month? Is there not anyway that this process can be accelerated by one of the judges, so that this hideous trainwreck can be put to bed.
Though Slashdot may not have anything to publish if there wan't a faily SCO story.
The article is a good summary for those of you tuning in late, or if you are perhaps a bit confused by the whole mess. Like the majority of the SCO news of late, it merely rehashes the situation, but it does provide a clearly articulated dissection of SCO's crack-induced legal arguments.
On the count of three, everybody make the obligatory SCO and/or Darl McBride is insane/Satan/Microsoft's toady comments. Ready? 1, 2, . . .
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
OSDL PDF/FSF HTML RPT WRT SCO GPL FUD
John.
The rest of this text is because the Slashdot lameness filter thinks that I am shouting which in fact I am now because the lameness filter is lame.
but it won't shut up SCO. There is money to be made and FUD to be spread.
What better title can you have than that? I mean, it speaks soo deeply of SCO's stratgies. Without Fear seems to stand for SCO's complete lack of healthy fear that keeps one from doing something fscking stupid, and I think that Without Research speaks for itself. It takes talent to come up with a title that grabs one like that. I know it seems silly to put so much focus on a title- I know "you can't judge a book by its cover," but people do it, and it's good to be able to take advantage of that. Kudos to the authors.
#define DRM chmod 000
While I agree with most things said in this paper it's just propaganda as well. There's the header Just The Facts and in the first paragraph under this header you can find the phrase SCO's cavalier attitude toward copyright law - that's not a fact, it's an interpretation. This could well have been just a mistake (Which of course I do not believe either - still you can't call it fact!)
You've got to question a report from the OSDL on the issue... but likely I bet you most people will just bash the SCO.
If the SCO releases a report saying the exact opposite, you'd use it as toilet paper. I'm not sayin the OSDL report is bad, its probably pretty accurate, but... what we need is a good 3rd party to anaylze this issue!
On Newsforge there is an article worth ignoring;
towit:"Lawsuit Drops 'Nuclear Bomb' on Software Industry".
The article needs a bit a research, to bad the author didn't.
A good example of write first, find out later.
SCO: Without Fear and Without Research
Eben Moglen
Monday 24 November 2003
There's a traditional definition of a shyster: a lawyer who, when the law is against him, pounds on the facts; when the facts are against him, pounds on the law; and when both the facts and the law are against him, pounds on the table. The SCO Group's continuing attempts to increase its market value at the expense of free software developers, distributors and users through outlandish legal theories and unsubstantiated factual claims show that the old saying hasn't lost its relevance.
Just The Facts
SCO continues to claim in public statements about its lawsuit against IBM that it can show infringement of its copyrights in Unix Sys V source code by the free software operating system kernel called Linux. But on the one occasion when SCO has publicly shown what it claimed were examples of code from Linux taken from Unix Sys V, its demonstration backfired, showing instead SCO's cavalier attitude toward copyright law and its even greater sloppiness at factual research.
On August 18, 2003, SCO's CEO, Darl McBride, offered a slide presentation of supposed examples of infringing literal copying from Sys V to Linux at a public speech in Las Vegas. Within hours the free software and open source communities had analyzed SCO's supposed best evidence, and the results were not encouraging for those investors and others who hope SCO knows what it is talking about.[1]
In Las Vegas Mr. McBride offered two examples of code from the Linux program that were supposedly copied from Sys V. The first implements the "Berkeley Packet Filter" (BPF) firewall. Indeed, the Linux kernel program contains a BPF implementation, but it is the original work of Linux developer Jay Schulist. Nor did SCO ever hold an ownership interest in the original BPF implementation, which as the very name shows was originally part of BSD Unix, and which was copied, perfectly legally, into SCO's Sys V Unix from BSD. Because the BPF implementations in Sys V and Linux have a common intellectual ancestor and perform the same function, SCO's "pattern-matching" search of the two code bases turned up an apparent example of copying. But SCO didn't do enough research to realize that the work they were claiming was infringed wasn't their own (probably because they had "carelessly" removed the original copyright notice).
Mr. McBride's second example was only slightly less unconvincing. Mr McBride showed several dozen lines of memory allocation code from "Linux," which was identical to code from Sys V. Once again, however, it turned out that SCO had relied on "pattern-matching" in the source code without ascertaining the actual history and copyright status of the work as to which it claimed ownership and infringement. The C code shown in the slides was first incorporated in Unix Version 3, and was written in 1973; it descends from an earlier version published by Donald Knuth in his classic The Art of Computer Programming in 1968. AT&T claimed this code, among other portions of its Unix OS, as infringed by the University of California in the BSD litigation, and was denied a preliminary injunction on the ground that it could not show a likelihood of success on its copyright claim, because it had published the code without copyright notices and therefore, under pre-1976 US copyright law, had put the code in the public domain. In 2002, SCO's predecessor Caldera released this code again under a license that permitted free copying and redistribution. Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) then used the code in the variant of the Linux program for "Trillium" 64-bit architecture computers it was planning to sell but never shipped. In incorporating the code, SGI violated the terms of Caldera's license by erroneously removing Caldera's (incorrect) copyright notice.
Thus SCO's second example was of supposedly impermissible copying of code that was in the public domain to begin with, and which SCO itself had released under a free software license after erroneou
SCO executives should be in court for stock manipulation and fraudulent billings.
It looks as if SCO really has no other recourse now except to just give up and wither away. They've tried to massage the facts to make their case believable; they've tried to use laws in an unlawful manner to break the GPL; and now that they've been exposed as a sham, what will they do now?
I hope that when a judge actually sits down and bangs his gavel, he'll take one look at SCO's case and throw it out. At this point there's almost no possible way that SCO could produce anything that would make their case believable, IMO.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
They've kept the Open Source world on the defensive. They experience consistent gains in the stock every time they announce a new initiative in their war on Free Software. They've been able to keep this going for far longer than I would have thought possible, and if this gets to trial the potential is there that they will prevail.
Who would have thought litigation was a way of making a living off of Free Software? I don't like what they're doing, but I have to confess my opinion of their strategy has changed. Fortunately, the rabid response they no doubt expected to provoke from the Open Source community hasn't manifested itself; I've been quite impressed with the professionalism and quality of the response as well. Keep posting these stories... we just can't get enough SCO.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
There is no non-compete clause. There is some fairly limited language in regard to Novell not selling or providing monetary incentives to its salespeople with respect to System V, but even that clause is rendered inoperative due to a Change of Control clause that went into effect when Caldera purchased the Unix assets from Old SCO (now Tarantella).
Welcome to the new diocese, Father. These upstanding lads are the choir...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I am not sure I follow this argument: Is it obvious (or known) that the code that SCO has distributed contains everything that, say, a RHAT distribution contains? Or could it (in principle) be that SCO's distro (old and unkempt as it is ;-) does not contain the "infringing" pieces while other distributions do?
Thanks.Similarly, has SCO distributed all of IBM's contributions to Linux (thus necessarily including the alleged trade secrets)?
Hey, did I miss some bad news for SCO? SCO stock jumped from 14$ to 16$.
The only thing I liked about SCO was a software app called MERGE, but now you can find the exact same thing called "Win4lin" for linux. Lets you virtualize your System to run 2 OS's at the same time.
This is the only company I could see SCO sue, the developers from NetTraverse used to work at SCO.
BTW, the article is a rehash. Every lawyer says the GPL is enforceable.
You don't find SCO's claims that copyright law supports their claims, but at the same time copyright law does not support the GPL, to be prima facia evidence of a cavalier attitude? Look Darl, you can't have it both ways. That's what the article is trying to point out.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Quoting the paper posted in the original article: "Unless SCO can show that the GPL is
a valid form of permission, and that it has never violated that permission's
terms, it loses the counterclaim, and should be answerable in damages not
only to IBM but to all kernel contributors."
Could this eventually be used to force SCO to pay kernel contributors because SCO was in fact infringing on their GPL'ed code?
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What about the contract dispute between IBM and SCO? If it is shown that IBM incorrectly included derivitive works of unix into linux, then SCO wins. This is where the "millions of lines of code" come from. This is not same as the few hundred lines of "copied code".
So what's his plan? Personally I think (2) is the answer, and he's sticking around for the money. He must be hoping there will be a buyout, perhaps by Microsoft or someone else of worth, which would raise the value of the stock he's been given.
This is also being discussed over at Groklaw, which any of you who still are reading Caldera stories should know about by now...
Logically, that will have to wait until the share price drops to nothing and it surfaces that the SCO execs have in fact dumped their stock for a sizeable chunk of change. It's hard to prove a "pump and dump" is going on when the stock price has risen from $1 or so and is still sitting around $15.
You then have to assume the SCO execs are going to be living somewhere from which the US government can extradite them. My betting is that places like Nth Korea, Niugini, the Dominican Republic and Cuba might be the subject of future travel plans for these guys.
I too think that Prof. Moglen's article's title "SCO: Without Fear and Without Research" is a fine title.
But the Slashdot thread title "OSDL Releases New Paper on SCO's Claims" steers the reader's attention to the wrong movement. I find it interesting that in this instance, the chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation is writing about the GNU General Public License (which both predate the Open Source movement by many years) and yet his work is credited to the so-called "Open Source Development Labs" (OSDL).
The Open Source movement stands for a different philosophy than the Free Software movement. Perhaps people who submit articles for Slashdot don't commonly know who Eben Moglen is, what he does, or what movement's interests he represents.
Digital Citizen
The vorst thing that could happen was for this to be resolved out of court. A court is a very nive place to get to information else unavaliable, like, for instance, what the fsck did Microsoft get a license for? The arent in the unix business by any mesure and i cant remember one single product that even touches unix coming from MS. In a court this kind of info might be revealed. If its apperent that they did not buy a license but instead just gave money under the table to fuel anti-linux FUD they will be hated, much more than today. Same goes for Sun for that matter.
The money trail into SCO needs to be resolved since there are some suspicious trails leading back towards Redmond.
Even if this is almost thinfoil-hat material Microsoft has pulled worse stunts than this before and under much less pressure than right now. They have a busuness modell that demands increased revenues each year and if the revenue drops even a bit they are down the tube. Id really like to know just how much stock is inside Microsoft and how fast people would sell if it stops gaining value in current pace.
By this i conclude that they dont have to loose any significant portion of the market to be toast. All it takes is a slowdown in their growth.
Wirh longhorn so far ahead and the impossibility for them to release yet another crappy OS again they have to slow linux implementation down until Longhorn is ready. If linux gains to much momentum now it will be almost impossible to stop, almost exactly like when Win95 was introduced and OS/2 came in too late.
HTTP/1.1 400
To what degree is the mainstream media reviewing reports like this recent one from OSDL? If they are, they're certainly not reporting it. It's looking pretty biased to me!
...There's a chance for more "dramatic gains in the SCO stock price"
...The ability to yank one million lines of code out of five million is substantial; Investors seem to believe that SCO's suit has merit
So, to the average investor, SCO's claim that they matched 1 out of 5 million lines of code in Linux is pretty damning evidence.. whereas domain experts like us can easily see through these lies. Hopefully this comes to light in the courts, 'cause people like us are certainly screaming in a vacuum right now!
I'm thinking that the the financial/business media is leaning towards SCO side since SCO represents a more conventional corporate america, and Linux / GPL threatens that model?
I have two little kids. I frequently tell them, "Hey, let's check your diaper for content."
So there you go.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
This is wrong. If Linux contains any formerly trade secreted code at all, that status has been forfeited not because of the GPL, but because it was published in the first place without their permission, and SCO would actually legitimately be entitled to compensation for damages (assuming that their IP was misappopriated in the first place, which I doubt).
What SCO does not have the authority to do is insist that their formerly trade-secret code remain inside of Linux while they want to continue to charge a license fee for it (SCO's obvious strategy being that by not revealing where the infringing code is, the likelihood of it getting removed is almost nil). The GPL expressly prohibits this, and SCO can't do a thing about this matter as long as the GPL remains a legal way of giving copyright permission.
Now the question becomes *WHY* shouldn't the GPL be a valid form of copyright permission? Just because it enforces derivative works to be subject to the same license is not a valid excuse by itself because derivative works would still contain some or all of the original work.
Put in the context of what is more commonly seen as normal copyright, if a person were to want to publish a book containing a portion of another work that was copyrighted by someone else, the second author would still need permission from the first author to publish his own book. The only way he can avoid needing permission is to simply not include the material copyrighted by another.
Bottom line. SCO is out of luck.
can be found in Lewis A. Mettler, Esq.'s blog.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Its important to continually restate the basic facts of the case. SCO is using the "Big Lie" propaganda strategy. To do this you keep saying big lies, the bigger the better. Eventually, some subset of the listeners will come to believe the lie, and another larger subset will come to believe some subset of the lie. In addition, all will be cowed. "Best not to risk it" being roughly equal to "you win". This method was perfected by Josef Goebbles (not that I want to trivialize his crimes through comparison to SCO). Of course Goebbles had sufficient control of the media to ensure no confilcting messages or inconvenient facts got in the way. Darl doesn't have that luxury. But the best way to counter the strategy is continual restatement of the facts in a credible manner. This paper should be viewed in that light, and is an excellent contribution to the cause.
"SCO is full of shit. And oh yeah, Darl has got balls of steel."
Pretty much sums up the last 20 SCO press release.
While it's indeed shit, the particulars of the shit in question vary from one voiding to another. And if we're not careful, a piece is likely to stick.
This posting is not about SCO's latest press/anal release. It's about a detailed lab report on SCO's fecal output. And the particulars of the report are very useful for forming a treatment plan - or for arranging a suitable quarantine or form of euthenasia for SCO - to prevent an epidemic.
So let's not just dismiss all SCO suit articles out of hand as redundant, shall we?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You are wrong, it is a fact that SCO has a cavalier attitude toward copyright law. It isn't a scientific fact, but it is still truly factual. Not all facts are scientific. SCO has been recklessly abusing the legal system, I don't see anything unfactual about that. This is in a context where SCO puts a legal paradox in front of a judge, and are just about certain to lose because they both use and deny themselves use of the GPL; that proposition seems to be as factual as it is contradictory. They even claim the GPL is against the US constitution! That is ludicrously true and a fact. It seems very truthful and factual to say that SCO is acting outside the norms of accepted behavior and making arguments which don't make logical sense in addition to trampling on the rights of the open source community and damaging their copyrighted holdings in Linux, AKA they are being 'cavalier'. Facts are not necessarily truths, but the truth is a fact. DEAL WITH IT BUCKO! This is whoop ass factuality!
I recently posted this comment on /.org. I sent in my complaints and got a response from the Attorney General's office. They basically said it was an issue under the jurisdiction of the SEC. How do I explain to them that the actions of SCO are also under their jurisdiction? I am thinking of their violating the GPL. Help me out to get a decent response to the Attorney General's office.
Please, everyone, THINK before you go throwing your support behind a concept which is, in its most basic form, designed to undermine our fundamental rights and values.
I have thought about it, and I think that the coming era of commoditized operating system software will be at least as big a boon programmers as the coming of commodity hardware was 15-20 years ago.
I'm thinking about how Apple decided to go with a "closed" hardware platform and MS decided to go with the "open" one. Apple released the first MacIntosh in 1984, and it wasn't until 1990 that MS had a workable Windows. Despite Apple's huge head start, MS won the race and become the dominant desktop OS. Why? Because MS customers could buy cheap commodity PC's that anyone could build, but Apple customers had to pay top dollar for a special computer only Apple could build.
Face it: Most customers don't want a computer, they want what a computer can do. MS won the race by realizing this, but they want to deny the next step in the logic: People don't want to buy an OS any more than they wanted to buy the computer. Applications are what customers want, and having to pay extra for a proprietary OS may be holding back the application market just as much as having to buy a proprietary computer held back Apple.
We've been creating operating systems for almost a half-century now. A lot of the basics were ironed out a long time ago. It's stupid for people to go on paying high prices for something that's been around for so long.
If you're a programmer, you should welcome Linux the same way a home builder would welcome the availability of inexpensive building materials and tools.
A good stock scam trumps facts and logic everytime.
Of course, it's just a stock scam. Scox is making this stuff up as they go along. And why not? It works, it works like all hell.
Only one person from the Enron scandle was sentanced to do any time. And Enron hurt a lot more people than scox.
The SEC, FTC, DOJ, or any Attorney General could shut scox down in a heart-beat. Just like Germany did, Germany put an end to scox's scam over there months ago. But the US justice system would rather look the other way while scox insiders laugh at them. Scox insiders are laughing all the way to the bank. And there is nothing the US justice system will do.
But if the GPL is not a valid and effective copyright permission, by what right is SCO distributing the copyrighted works of Linux's contributors, and the authors of all the other copyrighted software it currently purports to distribute under GPL? IBM's counterclaim against SCO raises that question with respect to IBM's contributions to the Linux kernel. Under GPL section 6, no redistributor of GPL'd code can add any terms to the license; SCO has demanded that parties using the Linux kernel buy an additional license from it, and conform to additional terms. Under GPL section 4, anyone who violates GPL automatically loses the right to distribute the work as to which it is violating. IBM therefore rightly claims that SCO has no permission to distribute the kernel, and is infringing not only its copyrights, but those of all kernel contributors. Unless SCO can show that the GPL is a valid form of permission, and that it has never violated that permission's terms, it loses the counterclaim, and should be answerable in damages not only to IBM but to all kernel contributors. (Copyright (C) Eben Moglen, 2003. Verbatim copying of this article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.) . .. ... ..
.
when, and i mean WHEN, SCO loses this case... i pray to the person/being/spirit of MY choice that every linux kernel developer files a suit against SCO! fuck letting them get bought out by someone (who would, and why?) let them wallow in bankruptcy for all the crap they have spewed. But i must thank them for legal precedent they will bring to the GPL and other such open licences.
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
How many people here are employed by companies doing software development? How many people here are PAID to develop software? How can any of you, in your right mind, even consider supporting the concept of "free" software? ALL software costs money, but in the case of "open source" or "free" software, the cost of the development is bourne by governments and corporations indirectly, instead of directly through paying actual developers. SCO is defending our RIGHT to create proprietary, closed source software. Apple and Microsoft are two examples of companies that simply could not exist if the notion of "open source" were dominant today. How much of our GDP is generated by these two companies alone? Are you all willing to give that up in your quest to destroy a 30+ year old profession?
Please, everyone, THINK before you go throwing your support behind a concept which is, in its most basic form, designed to undermine our fundamental rights and values.
I know, do not feed the trolls. But this is important.
1. Most of the programmers in the U.S. are not employed by Apple or Microsoft. Between them they employ maybe 50,000 programmers (probably less). There are 1 million programmers in the U.S., and they don't benefit from the fact that Microsoft made more than a billion dollars in profit last year (and by the way, paid no taxes). For programmers outside the U.S. it makes even more sense to support open-source development instead of commercial software, to keep more of the capital inside the country.
2. The vast majority of programmers, even at Apple and Microsoft, do not have any significant amount of stock, nor do they get a royalty every time one of their software programs is sold. Spending $400 on a brand-new copy of Microsoft Office doesn't help put food on the table of Microsoft's programmers, it helps put cash in the bank that they use to buy up small companies.
3. Free software developers are not trying to take away SCO's right to create proprietary, closed source software. On the contrary, SCO is trying to take away the right of Linux developers to create open-source software.
I'm employed full-time as a software developer. Sometimes my organization lets me develop free / open-source software, when that makes sense for the application - for example, sometimes it's faster and cheaper to modify an existing open-source program than it is to create something new from scratch or build off of a proprietary program.
I also develop free software on the side. Because I like to. It isn't eliminating jobs, it's making me more employable.
If there is SCO code inside of Linux, of course it should be removed. And whoever copied it there should be held liable. But that shouldn't affect everyone else - the thousands of innocent developers who have contributed to Linux legitimately.
How many people here are employed by companies doing software development? How many people here are PAID to develop software? How can any of you, in your right mind, even consider supporting the concept of "free" software?
I spent 35 years of my life making money as a programmer (before returning to the "Hard(ware) side of the Force").
And before that I studied under Bernie Galler. In the same issue of CACM as Djikstra's "GOTO considered Harmful" letter, Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote. His lament predicted the entire commercialization of software and its resulting inhibitory effects on the advancement of the art.
As an author of custom software applications for clients, my main problem was not competition from free software vendors. It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
If I had had access to the current results of the open-source movement, I could have been far more valueable to my clients - by completing things more rapidly or building more capable software. Thus I could have charged each customer more and moved to new customers more quickly, establishing a better reputation for productivity.
It is only the commercial software market that has any need to adjust its business models due to "competition" from open-source. This market employs a very small subset of programmers. And they're primarily employed by a few, large companies where most of the profit goes to administrators and investors rather than individual contributors.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
SCO is getting close to the first "put up or shut up" point. .
They have only sued one party, IBM.
Sure they have been threatening to sue everybody
but so far they have not.
Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote.
So what was he saying? That code redistributors should give away their hard work for free out of the goodness of their hearts forever and always?
Bernie was a professor. I presume that his viewpoint was that of an academic, treating software development as research for publication, not a consumable commodity.
How exactly, do you suppose, our civilization would work if everyone did that?
In the same way that academia has ALWAYS worked: Academics do work for reputation points (much like open-source). Sponsors fund applied research directed at their particular problems while patrons fund basic research for the longer-term benefits it provides. A PARTICULAR patron of basic research doesn't know that the things his PARTICULAR contribution supported will benefit him personally. But DOES know that, on the average, such patronage will result in benefits for him (and others like him).
Remember that writing the original software may be expensive work, but copying it once it is written is nearly free. If the software does enough to pay for itself, its cost is already covered. Copying and giving away any useful portion (that isn't your company's particular buisness advantage) has a large net benefit to the commons and a tiny cost to the contributer.
It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
So you want someone to provide you free resources for you to build your company on? Again, this is an unsustainable model for software development! Someone, somewhere, has to pay for your "free wheels". If it were that easy, why doesn't the government give us all "free cars"? After all, that seems to be a big impediment to many people's career aspirations.
As I pointed out above, creating additional instances of a piece of software costs almost nothing (unlike creating additional instances of cars). That makes the economic proposition MUCH different.
I would pay for my "free" software by contributing non-mission-specific components that I wrote to the commons. This is a win-win proposition:
- I benefit because the amount of effort I save by incorporating and perhaps tuning, rather than writing, open-source software is FAR greater than the amount I contribute - even if I HADN'T had to write that contribution anyhow to get my job done. I benefit even more if I contribute a fix or enhancement to some maintained package - because it becomes part of the release and I can then upgrade to a later version and incorporate other fixes or enhancements without having to redo my changes.
- Others benefit because they get my contribution, which they otherwise would not have had. My contribution might be small - but with a large number of people making small contributions the commons continues to expand.
As for major packages (like OSes, compilers, and the plethora of other open-source tools), some will be maintained by people who can build a business model around them (i.e. by charging for convenient packaging, support, or customization) or find some other business benefit for doing so (such as being the arbiter of a defacto standard), while others will be built and maintained by academics (for carreer advancement), hobbyists (for fun and recognition), and zealots (for the good feeling of having benefitted mankind and/or influenced history).
There are a plethora of ways to be "paid" for writing software, beyond the simplistic model of taking a cut derived from retail sales.
As to the sustanability of the model: The longer it runs, the greater the benefit/cost ratio. Software contributed to the commons doesn't go away, either with time or when someone "takes" a copy. The benefits go on and on, while the cost of each contribution
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
He stated that M$'s "donation" to SCO was merely a PR investment by M$ to bash Linux.
You know its bad news when someone in the PR industry knows whats up.
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