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McBride's New Open Letter on Copyrights
dtfinch writes "An open letter was posted today by Darl McBride, where he restates his claim that the GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, patent laws, copyright laws, and the DMCA. Mostly he just builds up a false image of the Free Software Foundation and open source supporters claiming that they have no respect for intellectual property and believe copyrights should be eliminated, then attacks that image, AKA the straw man attack. Nothing we haven't seen before."
Hm... Darl McBride writes an open letter. I thought that openness was against the US Constitution, ad nauseum.
#define DRM chmod 000
Nothing we haven't seen before.
Yet it qualifies as news here. No wonder McBride keeps running his mouth (:
From Linuxtoday.com: "The GPL is based on copyright law, unlike the 'shrink wrap' licences we are familiar with, which are based on contract law. Most countries worldwide have signed the Berne Copyright Convention, which protects software automatically upon creation. So the GPL has a more solid international grounding than if it were based on contract law, which can vary greatly from country to country..."
Esoteric reference.
Hey Dayl please keep your letters like the Unix source and your mind - closed.
What, nothing about it violating the Ten Commandments to boot?
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
Darl missed a few salient points that I will enumerate:
1) The GPL kills small cute furry animals.
2) The GPL causes cancer in laboratory animals.
3) The GPL encourages terrorism.
4) It hurts THE CHILDREN.
5) Reciting the text of the GPL backwards will cause the appearance of the Anti-Christ and will initiate the apocalypse.
Because someone new to the controversy, like some small-time CEO that thinks Linux is a character in Peanuts, might read it and wet his pants over it, so we have to respond to it, and make ourselves aware so that if our companies get cold feet about Linux adoption, we can rebut each SCO argument, and reassure our CEOs.
#define DRM chmod 000
Nowhere do I recall ever reading anything on compensation, that to me is more of an ethical issue if you ask me, but IANAL so I really don't want to stick my foot in my mouth... Or the kb in my ass. As I take the Constitution regarding copyrights is just as stated 'securing for limited times the exclusive right to their work'. SCO is turning this into a circus fanfare with a) either money the underlying issue, or b) other entities are using SCO as a puppet to do their deeds.
However, there is a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress. In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the Open Source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents.
This is serioulsy bold, and slanderous statement of this guy to make, and I'm wondering who's going to be the first to open a can of lawsuit ass on SCO. It's one thing to make known your beliefs, but to claim someone is intentionally breaking a law is no laughing matter. Pretty ballsy move. Stupid but ballsy.
Leaders of the FSF have spent great efforts, written numerous articles and sometimes enforced the provisions of the GPL as part of a deeply held belief in the need to undermine or eliminate software patent and copyright laws.
Know something, I couldn't even finish reading it because it's so dull, overrated, cumbersome to understand, and downright dumb at this point. Isn't it about time someone maybe IBM or some other bigwig came in the picture, did a hostile takeover and demoted this clown to mailroom janitor, or parking lot car washer.
MoFscker
Technology leadership? In 1986?! During the height of the Japanese bubble? This guy cracks me up! You're such a card, McBride.
--AC
In speaking of the DMCA
"...without protection, American companies would unfairly lose technology advantages to companies in other countries through piracy, as had happened in the 1970's.
This statement offers no explanation, whatsoever.
Don't they actually have to put up in court tomorrow?
If I remember right, tomorrow is the oral discovery arguments for their case against IBM. Doesn't this mean that tomorrow they have to actually justify their unwillingness to clarify the nature of their case and answer to a judge for it?
Can't wait to see what that does to their stock.
Am I totally mistaking the nature of Discovery, but doesn't it mean that any evidence they haven't submitted by tomorrow, they can't use in the case? Meaning if they don't clarify their violations, rather than just giving the names of a bunch of documents (some of which contain nothing but some #includes and a "not implemented" comment), the "linux community" can then go around confidently stating that no such violations exist?
When's Redhat's Lanham Act case get to hit court to ask for injunctions?
Anyway, it probably wouldn't be too far-out to assume Darl's letter is some kind of diversionary tactic. Or that they won't try to do something even bigger and noisier tomorrow to draw attention away from the court.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
After reading Darl's wonderful letter of ignorance and greed I'd have to conclude that it was largely written by David Boies or one of his minions. Though it's been mentioned that the author, as indicated from the doc's headers, was not McBride, or one of the lawyers, my guess is that it was just composed by the authors mentioned, but the actual text originated with a lawyer.
First of all it doesn't sound like the Darl we know and love. I've read enough of his BS and listened to him enough to know his style and this letter just doesn't have it. It tries to show some hint of intelligence which we all know McBride is devoid of. Second, the information about the Supreme Court rulings, the constitution, and the DMCA all read like a lawyer wrote them. It reads like it came from the world's most ignorant and incompetent lawyer, but it was definitely from a lawyer.
It's too bad for Boies that his name is being put on such utter trash. He did have a good reputation once, but it'll be ruined before this case is over.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
It's a little clever, actually. The DMCA is opposed by many who also support the GPL, the common ground being that both groups tend to be deeply concerned by the proper application of intellectual property rights. The DMCA is also opposed by scofflaw copyright infringers, those being the people it was nominally designed to fight. Therefore, people who support the GPL are copyright infringers and scofflaws.
It's not a tactic that works against people who habitually apply logical analysis to what they read, but that isn't the majority of people, is it? (If it were, many a war would never have taken place.)
From this article is one the best quotes from Linus yet:
... is the only one that is expressly designed so that individual people can (and do) get them without having scads of lawyers on their side."
I'm a big believer in copyrights," Torvalds wrote in an e-mail interview. "Of all the intellectual property (laws), copyright
"If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution," he wrote.
Darl is saying that all rights for non profit are disabled.
More like he's saying that a code author has no right to restrict their work in such a way that it can be distributed anywhere and modified freely by anyone within the terms of the licence provided by the original author. In Darl's view, copyright law is concerned with restricting works from being distributed without compensation, not with ensuring that authors are allowed to control distribution of their work as they see fit. He can't seem to wrap his head around the fact that many people have chosen to use their rights, as authors, under copyright law, to choose a set of restrictions that promotes copying and changing of their code, as long as anyone else can do the same. He only understands copyright in terms of sales and exclusivity.
Short version: in Darl's world, you can choose to restrict your works, but you can't choose to restrict your works into openness. Everything must be proprietary and closed, everyone must view each other as competitors to be fought instead of companions to collaborate with.
This seems to be the only logical way, outside of the obvious "pump 'n dump scheme" guess, to explain Darl's view of FOSS.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
This was posted several months ago, but I think it still stands now. Copyrights are wrong, and anti free market, and immoral, and too many people are being spoonfeed poor beliefs.
BITTER PROTEST AGAINST COPYRIGHTS
If I said I didn't have an incentive to grow oranges unless I could plant a tree in your yard, or if I said I didn't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I could own slaves on the plantation, most people would see this is these as the worthless shallow arguments that they are. But if I said I didn't have an incentive to to make beneficial or creative works without a copyright monopoly, then all of a sudden people just take it on faith, they don't even question it, they just assume that society would fall apart without them. In my humble opinion, this is intellectually dishonest, especially considering that the entire Renaissance happened without copyrights.
The simple fact is, there is no equivalency relationship between copyrights and property rights - incentive does not a right make. The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the fact that property has physical limits, while the foundation of copyrights dervives from kings who granted publishers monopolies in return for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. The history of copyrights is not one of rights, but control of sharing and restricting the open use of knowledge.
That is why people who copy are not criminals, thieves, or akin to pirates who board ships and murder people. No, infact they are really victims of a cruel deception. A deception that copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every artist that makes it "big" there are literally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, even hindered, or destroyed.
However, this is not the only failure of copyrights - it is just one in many issues related to copyrights that are just blown off ignored, or glossed over. Like the failures of Hollywood culture, the failures of big media to provide quality material, the failures to provide reasonably priced books to college students while tabloids are dirt cheap, and massive anti-trust behavior in the software industry to name a few.
While the problems associated with copyrights might have been bearable 20 years ago when the biggest issue was Xerox machines, today we are entering into the information age where information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no middle ground. Our society will either have to control all of it or none of it. Our communications will either have to be monitored or free, our privacy to be either contunuiously probed or protected.
In that sense, copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off our freedoms until we cut it off at the root. The DMCA, infinite extensions, billion dollar lawsiuts, are all just symptoms of a poor belief system - not the cause. So the efforts to find a "middle ground" on copyrights are a failure because they do not address the core issue. That contrary to copyrights, the right to copy and distribute creative works and knowledge is a right!
Like freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, the right to copy things is a right that exists above government. It is a moral right, it is an inherent right, it defines the very nature of the human condition. It is beyond politics and the petition of leaders.
In fact, the entire foundation of politics rests on the notion that it's better to fight wars with words than wars with bloodshed. But to copy things does not require coercion or viloence at all, the rules are not the same. We will not change the copyright situation by petitioning our leaders, or voting to change the system. No it can only be changed by defiance.
Defiance by holding the belief that people have rights, even if those rights appear contrary to the popular mob or to the system. Defiance, by shedding off the guilt and shame that those who try to impose copyrights impose on us and understanding that they are
Dear Person Reading this Letter:
You are in violation of copyright law, as I have copyrighted this letter and encoded it using an advanced version of english which we have developed at SCO group.. Each sentence, as you can see, ends in two puncuation marks, however, you seem to be able to read the text just fine..
We regret to inform you that there is no possible other implementation for this english derivative, is our copyright, and therefore, you must be circumventing our extremely intelligent and work with the intent of profit..
Sincerely,
Darl McBride
It's amazing how McBride can continuously attack the GPL and open source. Yet in the back of my mind all I can think is, "Caldera Linux... Caldera Linux..." If McBride is so against the GPL, then why did he agree to take the CEO position of a company with it's foundations built upon everything he attacks? Quote:"However, there is a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress. In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the Open Source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents." Funny how he forgets that for a good couple of those 20 years, the company he now leads was a part of the Open Source software movement he despises. "Yes your honor, we would like to sue IBM for being more sucessful with open source than we were. We hate it because we lost all our money in it." Back in beginning months these stories really made me angry, now it's my weekly /. humor!
Mcbride may be playing loosely with the term, but still he made aver rediculous statement that i would like to point out:
We believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a profit from their work.
If any real scince was carried out that way, we would still be in the dark ages. Real science is developed through scientific journals. Open publication of their discoveries and progress. How far would we be if lived in a society where Mathematicians had to pay roalities for using other peoples theroms in their proofs?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There's nothing particularly wrong with Copyrights (although terms are now excessive) but it is SCO who is assaulting them by trying to steal the work of thousands of developers, not the other way around.
Darl says:
The software license adopted by the GPL is called "copy left " by its authors. This is because the GPL has the effect of requiring free and open access to Linux (and other) software code and prohibits any proprietary use thereof. As a result, the GPL is exactly opposite in its effect from the "copy right " laws adopted by the US Congress and the European Union. - But, Darl, you can use GNU/Linux and other Free Software as much as you want. It is when you try to redistribute Free Software under a different licence, it is the moment when you violate the GPL - you violate a licence. GPL is your EULA if you will, only it does not affect your USAGE of Free Software in any way, only your redistribution of Free Software. You do know what a contract means, don't you?
In taking this position SCO has been attacked by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and many software developers who support their efforts to eliminate software patents and copyrights. Internet chat boards are filled with attacks against SCO, its management and its lawyers. Personal threats abound. At times the nature of these attacks is breathtaking - the emotions are obscuring the very clear and important legal issues SCO has raised. This is to be expected when the controversy concerns such deeply held beliefs. - Darl, when you try to STEAL people's copyrighted work, it is the moment when you start getting these kinds of reaction. At the moment when you decide to enslave the free, at the moment when you decide to take away something that belongs to everyone by the expressed permission of the copyright holder, at this moment you become an enemy. When you LIE, you become an enemy and an annoyance.
Despite the raw emotions, however, the issue is clear: do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support "free" - as in free from ownership - intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others? There really is no middle ground. The future of the global economy hangs in the balance. - Darl, but it is you, who do not recognize the copyright, you do not want to recognize a contract for redistribution of Free Software that you enter, once you start redistributing Free Software. You are going against simple contract and copyright laws, nothing else.
The Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and other GPL advocates take the contrary position. The FSF and Red Hat believe that the progress of science is best advanced by eliminating the profit motive from software development and insuring free, unrestricted public access to software innovations. The Free Software Foundation was established for this purpose. The GPL implements this purpose. Red Hat speaks for a large community of software developers dedicated to this purpose. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has dramatically undercut this position with its guidance in Eldred in how to define the term "promote the Progress of Science and the useful arts..." under the Constitution. - Supreme Court is misguided at best and at worst it has a hand in the pie. What you call innovation, others call extortion. If a hundred programmers come up with an exactly same solution algorithm to a problem why should one of them be able to subdue the rest into paying royalties for something that must be free? An algorithm? It is bound to happen simply by the nature of mathematics - anyone familiar with math knows, the Pythagorus theorem could be discovered by many individuals simply because in math it is natural to find the most optimal solutions to problems, and the proven theorems are such solutions. Software is all about algorythms and thus it is about the most optimal solutions, and these solutions can be expressed as theorems. Such ideas must be free for everyone to use, since they are the tools, the building blocks that we use in order to solve our real life problems. If we are not allowed to free
You can't handle the truth.
According to the www.groklaw.net article "Darl's "Greed is Good" Manifesto", and to this source from Yahoo, Darl's open letter was written by Kevin McBride and Dean Zimmerman, (a tech writer). At least the word document meta data says so.
:)
And there I was hoping Darl at least understood his position well enough to write garbage like this by himself. Does Darl even exist, or is he like the Wizzard Oz, a non-existant entity? Just kidding. He may become a non-existant entity after the court-room is done with him, though
You can't handle the truth.
I don't get it. How can the GPL be unconstitutional ? It's not a law, it's just a license -- a private contract between two parties. The Constitution simply doesn't apply. Now, SCO can claim that the GPL is unenforceable, but that's a different story altogether. What next ? Reading is declared unconstitutinal because it can potentially detract from the market of audio books ?
>|<*:=
(As a diclaimer, IANAL, but I have read Eldred and I am familiar with public policy issues on copyright.)
Straw man is the correct term for this letter, as the entire case McBride makes is on a complete misunderstanding of both the GPL and Eldred.
First of all, his use of Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution illustrates absolutely nothing. There is nothing in the GPL that precludes or infringes upon this statute in the least. Congress has the power to grant exclusive rights to a creation but has no power to legally mandate what the terms of those rights are. (See Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City 383 US 1.) Congress has the right to grant me a patent, and if I want to take that patented product and license it to whomever, there is nothing that Constitutionally prevents me from doing so. In other words, if IBM patents a new storage device and they want to make those specifications publicly available through GPLed drivers they have every right to do so. If they want to license such technology to only one company, they may do so. If they want to take every existing model and shove it up their ass, they have every legal right to do so.
Furthermore, precedent sets that the patent power is limited only for the purpose of the "progress of science" - as Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc 489 US 141 states:
What McBride argues is that the public domain itself is somehow contradictory to the very notion of copyright, and argument which simply does not hold to much scrutiny. Even the majority opinion in Eldred acknowledges that the Constitution does not allow for a perpetual system of copyright, and that at some point material must fall into the public domain.
The argument that profit motive is the best way of ensuring the public good is fine, but it is essentially a non-sequitor in this case. If the Linux kernel contains SCO code then that code has to be legally removed. However, SCO has no right to dictate that only proprietary licenses are legally valid, and that argument does nothing to advance their particular case. Moreover, any judge who has to rule on such a prima facie idiotic argument will quickly rule that SCO has no legal ground. The GPL is, as many have already mentioned, based on an acknowledgement of copyright law and relies on copyright law as a basis for its licensing terms. SCO has no right to say that a copyright holder must use a proprietary license any more than Red Hat says that SCO must drop all claims to their proprietary source code. There is no legal foundation for such a position and McBride clearly has no understanding of the revelant law.
Darl,
I've got to tip my hat to you. It's rare that you can find someone so outspoken and with such an interesting interpretation of reality who is also able to elicit such vociferous and multitudinous responses from your friends and (more often) your enemies. Really, for your family's sake at least, I feel better knowing that when someone finally points out that the emperor has no clothes, you'll have no problems finding employment in the afternoon talk show circuit.
In the months since you've launched your Sisyphean attack on Linux and Open Source Software in general I've come to regard you with something of a grudging affinity. Like that crazy uncle you hope never shows up for family events but then miss terribly when he's not there, you've become a constant ache that I just know I'm going to miss. Who else can I count on to inspire such fits of laughter and frothing rage?
It's with this new found amiability towards you that I make the following offer. I know you've been wanting someone to buy up The SCO Group and in the interests of not seeing you completely financially devastated, I'd like to buy your company. I'd like to offer you a one crisp United States dollar bill for the entirety of The SCO Group. You may find the amount a little less than you'd hoped for, but as Homer Simpson was once counseled (if I may paraphrase) "I think you should take it."
You see I've been both amused, enraged, and more recently dismayed as the scope of your intellectual property land grab expands. I finally decided that some sort of intervention was necessary after I read your latest diatribe in which you both demonstrated a profound lack of understanding of intellectual property law as well as the GPL and made thinly veiled threats to employ the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to further expand your legal assault against Linux. Darl, have you even read the DMCA? Do you know what it is or says? Were you aware that you've got to actually demonstrate you've got copyright in something that's been infringed before you can even open that can of worms?
I'm sure it may have slipped your mind what with all the heavy composition you've apparently been engaged in, but although you've talked a lot about your lawsuits with IBM and RedHat, you haven't actually won either of them yet. As such, that presents a real problem for your DMCA strategy because so far you've been unable to demonstrate an intellectual property interest of The SCO Group that's been infringed in any way. Sort of putting the cart before the horse aren't we?
Surely it's also obvious to you now that you've painted yourself into a corner with respect to the GNU Public License (GPL)? If you prevail and the GPL is declared invalid, as a distributor of many works (including Linux) which were formerly licensed under the GPL, The SCO Group would appear to be guilty of copyright infringement on a rather unprecedented scale. (Without the GPL Darl you can't distribute Linux or Samba.) If you fail, and the GPL is valid, you've released all your supposedly infringed works into the Open Source community under terms where you lose all ability to make infringement claims on pretty much any IP grounds. In which case any value of any intellectual property left in the corpses of your versions of Unix is pretty much gone.
So please, I urge you, it's time to stop the madness. Take me up on my offer, let Mr. Boise have his cut of my buyout, and walk away a winner Darl. I'm pretty sure it's the best offer you're going to get.
Your friend,
Specter
When McBride argues about the legal underpinnings and defending it by court decisions, he is backward looking. Courts are restricted to only looking at the past and existing laws and legislations in making decisions.
On the temporal scale the Judiciary has control over the past. The legislature is forward looking and has control over the future. So, any law that the legislature passes now, will become the touchstone by which the courts will judge later. And on the temporal Scale the Executive has control over the present. I beleive in this case, the Execution should be done by the Market forces, rather than by an arm of the Government. (And SCO must be executed too.)
Based on the results of the market forces, the legislature should then frame "forward looking legislations" that then become the laws which the courts must address. Currently, and in all the arguements that McBride advances, the fact is that the courts were restricted to INTERPRETING "Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the LEGAL sense only - obviously the legal framework is vvery restrictive in identifying what really "Progress" means, and is it must be understood that the courts had their hands toed behind their backs - thier's is a legal interpretation of Progress and not a broader economic, social, cultural, and political meaning of Progress.
The meat of my comment is above - the rest of the comment is just trying to build my case more ...
The global economy is not hanging in the balance, waiting breathlessly for SCO/McBride to vulturize millions so the "global economy" can breathe a sigh of relief. This is just another bluster from the McBride. McBride is nothing but a fly on the wall in terms of the current efforts and "real work" that are really advancing the state of the global economy. I highlight this McBride quote, because it captures bluster of the rest of his sophomoric argument.
It is interesting that he talks about the "legal underpinnings" being sound. If tomorrow the Legislature passes a law (legislations are forward looking), that makes it clear that there is no room for interopretation, and SCO is wrong and stupid, that will be the easy end to the SCO/McBride Extortion story. Like McBride says " Internet chat boards are filled with attacks against SCO, its management and its lawyers," and I think they are filled with attacks for a good reason. And since the chatboarders are also voters, it would be possible for them to choose the right representatives, who would go and legislate, and then carry the legal "attacks" on SCO rather than just have flame wars.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
In the second paragraph, McBride writes:
"SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws."
He then spends the rest of the letter explaining why copyright is great, and why the FSF and Red Hat are evil for opposing copyrights. Fine. But *nowhere* is there any reasoning given why the GPL violates the consitution, copyright law or patent law. In fact, by the end of the letter, McBride is forced to write:
"Based on the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, we believe that adoption and use of the GPL by significant parts of the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws. We believe that responsible corporations throughout the IT industry have advocated use of the GPL without full analysis of its long-term detriment to our economy. We are confident that these corporations will ultimately reverse support for the GPL, and will pursue a more responsible direction."
Note that there's *nothing* about the legality of the GPL. Adopting the GPL may be a "mistake", but nowhere does he even attempt to prove the point that he started with, that the GPL is a violation of the constitution and laws of the US.
Too bad for SCO. The only way they can have a long term money-making plan with Linux is if they get the GPL declared illegal, all developer contributions under it made into code in the public domain (I suppose public domain is against the constitution too?!), then they can assert ownership of the whole product based on whatever proprietary contributions they think were made against their wishes by IBM et al. IANAL, but it ain't gonna happen.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
ye == the. y is a rune, pronounced like 'th'
'ye shalt' is then wrong. 'thou shalt'
'readeth' is not a proper conjugation, simply use 'read'.
'ye hearts' should be 'thy heart dost'
'I am using ye' => 'I be using the'
'hast thou hearest' => 'hast thou not heard'
'Remindest' is an improper combining of dost. Drop the do, and add an apostrophe: Remind'st
'ones'? just 'one' will do.
Most humbly, I remain _thy_ servant...
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
SCO in particular, hasn't noticably changed their product since I was saddled with 286 Xenix a decade and a half ago. Neither their product nor their technical support improved from the first time I used it a decade and a half ago to the last time (And I swore it'd be the last time) I used it just about 4 years ago. I bet it hasn't noticably changed in those 4 years either, especially judging from SCO's current posturing.
So instead of cleaning up their own house (Because they don't know how) they'd rather try to destroy the only source of IT innovation around. People with SCO's mentality (Sadly widespread in corporate America) would shit in your dinner because they don't know how to cook themselves.
Currently the publicity's been pretty one-sided. How's about we start dusting off our technical contacts and start working to expose the lies?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Take a look at this document (note: it's a PDF file). It's written in legalese, but if you read between the lines, it shows what happens when a lawyer loses patience. Basically, IBM's law firm can't call SCO a bunch of liars, cheats, four-flushers and shysters in a court document, but this document sure makes it sound like they wish they could. Highly entertaining, and highly recommended.
Someone you trust is one of us.
They've already entered several counterclaims. No sense having two trials when one will suffice, right? IBM has claimed Breach of Contract, Lanham Act Violation, Unfair Competition, Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations, Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices, Breach of GNU General Public License, Promissory Estoppel (in regards to the GPL) Copyright Infringement, four counts of Patent Infringement, and is seeking a Declaratory Judgment. Should be enough to bury SCO, eh?
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
You can clearly tell the lawyers wrote it
That letter can't have been written by a lawyer: it just makes no sense whatsoever. Even someone who ordered his law degree by mail would know better.
The letter argues that because the FSF takes a certain political view of copyrights, its copyright-related contracts are invalid and violate the US constitution. That's roughly like saying that you would lose your drivers license because you have stated that cars are bad for the environment.
Fortunately, we live in a country where one's political views don't generally affect the validity of the contracts we enter in.
Plan9. Inferno. NeXTStep. Arguably the original Macintosh and the Xerox PARC work they extended.
Meanwhile, in the open-source world, we're fundamentally tweaking UNIX clones. Totally kick-ass, love-'em, best-of-breed unix clones, but still. You might cite Hurd but, comparatively speaking, it's a toy.
None of the commercial UNIX vendors has done a whole lot to advance the state of the operating system from where it was 30 years ago.
Isn't Apple a commercial UNIX vendor now?
SCO in particular, hasn't noticably changed their product since I was saddled with 286 Xenix a decade and a half ago
Sadly, that's probably true..
I had to read 3/4ths of that stupid letter to finally get to the point. Apparently they contend that a license, like the GPL, strips the profit motive from a work, and is inherently illegal. To justify this, it pontificates broadly on some recent court cases and the constitutional basis for copyright law.
Just because the constitution defined copyright to help protect profit motives and thus speed along innovation, that does not mean we cannot use copyright law in a different way.
I'd like to direct Darl McBride to the ninth ammendment to the constitution of the United States of America. To paraphrase, it basically means that if something hasn't been outlawed, it's legal. Or in other words, nothing is illegal until it has been outlawed. When it comes to using copyright in a different way, that means that there's no law saying that we cannot use an existing law in a way that it wasn't intended (so long as that doesn't break any existing laws).
Yeah, it's a rather weak legal point, but if that's what you're screaming, then you've probably missed my larger point. Every (weak and rambling) point that the article puts forth can be countered by hundreds of examples that prove that this new use of copyright law fits in the mold of what the founding fathers intended. Innovation is happening under this model, the masses have found a way to be involved and to contribute to OSS and the greater good is being served every step of the way. To anyone who cannot see that, I would respectfully question their motives and/or their awareness of temporal reality.
-Chuck
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Interesting that this letter is published the day before all 3 motions to compel in the case between SCO and IBM are scheduled for oral arguments? (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031123 184010235)
I reckon this is just a ruse to get their stock price as high as possible before they get their ass handed to them later today and it crashes through the floor.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Surely 'Hungry, horny penguins?' It'd make for a great headline - 'McBride fuxed, snaxed by Tux.'
You're dealing with an entity that:
- Technically died a long time ago, but hasn't stopped moving
- Needs to suck the lifeforce out of other entities to ensure its own survival
You don't simply bury something like that. You need to cut off its head and put a stake through its heart first.A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
me think'st thou hast too much fuckinth time on thine handsth.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai