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Red Hat's Open Source Assurance Program

Posted by michael on from the safety-blanket dept.

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.

1 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. SCO is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It is official; The Register confirms: SCO is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SCO community when The Register confirmed that SCO market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent The Register survey which plainly states that SCO has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SCO is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SCO's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SCO faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SCO because SCO is dying. Things are looking very bad for SCO. As many of us are already aware, SCO continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    OpenLinux is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time SCO developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: SCO is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    SCO leader Darl McBride states that there are 7000 users of OpenUnix. How many users of SCOSource are there? Let's see. The number of OpenUnix versus SCOSource posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SCOSource users. SCO/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of SCOSource posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SCO/OS. A recent article put OpenLinux at about 80 percent of the SCO market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 OpenLinux users. This is consistent with the number of OpenLinux Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, OpenLinux went out of business and was taken over by Caldera who sell another troubled OS. Now Caldera is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that SCO has steadily declined in market share. SCO is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SCO is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. SCO continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, SCO is dead.

    Fact: SCO is dying