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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
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.
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.
Ah... but we haven't had a good SCO letter of FUD to harp on for a couple of days.
Myself... I found the part where he talked about the glory of copyright where the author could do anything he wanted with it and then moaned and complained that he can't take GPL code and make it proprietary rather poetic.
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
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.
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.
(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.
bre-x was a mining company with a large stake in indonesia. although the stake was considered to be mediocre at best, bre-x brought back some core samples for assay that showed insanely high gold concentrations. shortly thereafter, bre-x announced that they had a 210 million oz find (at $300 an ounce... well, do the math)
it was all faked, of course. they had "salted" the core samples (literally sprinkling gold into the crushed "ore") and then spun the results as far as they would go. the result was an astronomical stock price and a lot of very very rich directors and geologists.
by the time that anyone had figured out that the whole thing was a pum and dump, most of the directors had fled to the grand caymans - except for one who "fell" (possibly pushed) from a helicopter over the indonesian jungle.
bottom line: five people got wealthy of a pack of lies, thousands lost their life savings on stock, one lost his life. it's the exact same business model with sco... yet apparently investors haven't learned a damn thing.
2 1337 4 u!
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
Dearest Darl... Thou hast a problem with ye English language? Then ye shalt readeth of the Bible of GPL until ye hearts bleed. As thou canst tell, I am using ye ancient version of ye English language, which hast been placed in ye public domaine many moons ago. Besides, hast thou hearest of ye King James Bible? Remindest ones of ye Ancient Unix. humbly your servant...
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)
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.
I'd say the funny part about the author's rants and raves about Red Hat are contradicted in the link provided:
Red Hat has aggressively lobbied Congress to eliminate software patents and copyrights.
However, after visiting the site, the only word used is "patent," the only occurance of "copyright" is at the bottom of the page claiming that it's a © of Redhat.
McBride, with any luck. In Antarctica. Amongst a bunch of angry, hungry penguins.
-- Soruk
Surely 'Hungry, horny penguins?' It'd make for a great headline - 'McBride fuxed, snaxed by Tux.'