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Red Hat's Open Source Assurance Program
scubacuda writes "ZDnet and others report that Red Hat now offers the 'Open Source Assurance Program' as protection for customers if they get hit with a copyright infringement case from the SCO Group. From their website: 'A key feature of the Open Source Assurance Program is an Intellectual Property Warranty. The warranty ensures, that in the event that an infringement issue is identified in Red Hat Enterprise Linux software code, Red Hat will replace the infringing code. Red Hat's warranty assures customers that they can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and related solutions without interruption. The warranty is available for all customers having a valid registered subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux or related solutions.'" Following close behind Novell and Hewlett-Packard, but it looks like Red Hat is not actually indemnifying their customers like Novell and HP, but rather is simply promising to fix any real copyright problems moving forward, which is something I think we would assume they would do in any case.
Seeing as SCO can prove just about diddly, I don't think the RedHat Legal Code Change team will have much to do. The cards are being called SCO. Bluff time is over.
I'm not sure having Red Hat indemnify me or my company would give me the warm fuzzies anyway...
for indemnification to be meaningful you have to assume that the pockets behind it are deep enough to be able to actually pay out and protect you when (god forbid) the time comes.
Red Hat doesn't have enough of a track record for their promise to protect me to mean too much to me.
Yeah, replacing the ostensibly offending code is nice, but it won't get me off the hook if I've already been using something that has been found to be infringing.
With all that said you have to really believe that there is a reasonable shot of SCO succeeding for any of this to be terribly meaningful to you...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
It seems to me that SCO's pathetic case is shifting away from copyright and into ideas. If a ruling comes down saying that, for example, nobody but SCO can use the methods involved in a critical feature of RHE, what happens then?
Managers and lawyers don't care about the facts unless those facts are in writing.
Of course they'd fix it going forward, but it gives manadrones and legal eagles a warm, fuzzy feeling to see documents that actually say that.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
huh?
if you can't indemnify 3rd parties, who the heck can you indemnify? That's the very definition of the word, to protect another party against damage or loss...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
This is, after all, first and foremost a bit of marketing. Red Hat is trying to get the message out to customers and would-be customers that the whole SCO thing does not create uncertainty or risk over the purchase or use of their product.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
To echo some earlier posters, yes it is legally useless, but my guess is that they feel they can offer it since they'll know they'll never need to follow through. As in ... "Sure, if God ever showed up on earth to judge you, I'd take the blame for your sins.".
The Linux Community has already offered to rip out the infringing code and replace it once it is identified. Red Hat has understood that the community is going to live to its word and has formalized this into an offer of "Intellectual Property Warrant." This formal offer on behalf of the community may be more acceptable to the business folks rather than the diffuse commitments of the Linux Community. I think that's all there is to it.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
The problem SCO is facing is this: they want to sell Linux "licenses" because their intellectual property is supposedly in there. And let's be clear -- it's not patent, trade secret, or trademark IP but copyright IP. But as soon as they say "we own this", the code can get yanked within days or weeks and re-written. So the licenses are worthless, which is why they're being so coy about pointing to the code (aside from silly claims on the ABI headers)
Of couse, they're suing IBM, alleging contract violations for letting their Super Special (and mysteriously Secret) stuff into Linux and claiming AIX, etc is a derivative of UNIX system V. And maybe there is a thin legal thread that might encumber AIX.
But who signed that contract on behalf of Linux? No one. Linux might have a few lines of copied code, but with no contract with SCO, there's no legal reason SCO gets to "own" Linux by calling it a derivative -- you'd need a contract for that.
So even if they're right, they're hosed. And I have my doubts about how right they are.
RedHat is saying to its customers "You can keep using our product without worry: We'll be right over to replace any part of your RedHat Linux solution which SCO can convince a judge they own."
RedHat has it right. They know SCO can't sue an end user for breach of contract if SCO doesn't have a contract with the end user.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
if you can't indemnify 3rd parties, who the heck can you indemnify?
If I license Red Hat Enterprise Linux then Redhat and I are the first and second parties. Why should I care what they do for third parties?
That's why they removed fortune cookie and mp3 support from their distro.
Here at work, once you get exposed to open source code, you can never go back to dealing with internal code merely due to the risks that algorithms you develop internally may accidentally be recreated in open source work.
Sorry, that just seems basakwards. There is no problem with "recreating algorithms" from open source software, since it is protected by copyrights, not by patents. Some licences (e.g. BSD) will even let you copy source code as long as you give credit where credit is due.
I'd say you or your company have either fallen for FUD or are trying to spread some.
-- MarkusQ
Where do you get programers then? I assume that you wouldn't hire me because I've worked for a different company before, and I might recreate something that the previous company did. Seriously, this boggles my mind, I've had access to source code from 2 different companies, plus a bunch of code [mostly trivial but not all] in school. I could accidentally be coping some of that code into your products.
The company or person who put the [currently vapor] code there may be held liable. But not the end user who has been assured that the code is open source.
If someone contributed a short story to the NYT, and the NYT times printed it, a reader of the paper would certainly not owe royalties if the copyright turned out to be bogus.
I could be wrong, but my guess is that this isn't an analyst's measure of risk, but rather a mathematical measure based on past volatility (related to Beta, for you finance people who know more than me out there).
Don't be silly. Within a few hours SCO will release a press release saying that Red Hat's actions prove that there are flaws in the Linux development process, and that Red Hat is putting themselves at risk. You gotta remember SCO logic. IBM doesn't indemnify -- IBM knows there's problems with Linux. HP does indemnify -- HP knows there's problems with Linux. You simply cannot win against this kind of logic.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Also, what about patents? The "Assurance program" isn't limited to copyrights. If some program is found to infringe a patent, there may not be any way to reimplement the functionality without still infringing.