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IBM Moves To Enforce GPL By Summary Judgement
gvc writes "So much for the GPL 'never being tested in court.' IBM, in its third motion for summary judgement against SCO, is seeking a permanent injunction against SCO's distribution of Linux, on the grounds that SCO has renounced and violated the GPL, and therefore has no right to distribute the 700,000 lines of IBM-copyrighted code therein. As usual, Groklaw broke the story." We previously reported on another IBM summary judgement from earlier this week.
How about their stagnant Unix that is wrapped in GPL software so that it is functional?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Well if IBM get their judgement this could be just about the best news for free software since GNU started.
It's certainkly worth the trauma of the last year to get the GPL publicly upheld in court.
Here's three cheers for IBM (and SCO;-).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I only hope a difinitive judgement will be issued to answer the (legal) question of the GPL once and for all. IIRC, the question of the GPL has been brought up before but has always been settled out of court.
Since the GPL has never really been tested in court (that I know of) it will be interesting to see how it is disassembled and twisted by the SCO lawyers to become ineffective.
IBM has a decent case, it brings to mind the image of a kitten poking at a Rotty.
The GPL is well written enough, it should stand up in court, even against SCO.
At least, I hope it will, or else we have a whole new battle on our hands...
Remember, if the the court finds the GPL to be invalid, regular copyright law takes effect and IBM can sue SCO for copyright infringement over the IBM-written code in Linux. The court may not have a position on the GPL yet, but it certainly understands copyright.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
SCO said their code is in Linux, files motion (breaks GPL) and now it is found that SCO has been illegally distributing IBM's code without licence (as the GPL has been invalidated).
If IBM's motion is successful this would open the door for IBM to sue SCO for the breach!
Or else the copyright would have been signed over to the Free Software Foundation, and IBM wouldn't be defending it right now.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I suspect the judge will end up going along with this one, at least temporarily, though there's a strong likelihood it'll be permanent. Until the ownership issues of Linux are sorted out, the status quo is applicable, and the status quo in this case is Linux being distributed under the terms of the GPL. To that end, either SCO is ceding its ownership rights of the code by distributing it, or violating the GPL. Either way, given their current business model, it's pretty apparent that SCO is going to have to stop distributing the kernel.
Rest assured, they are _not_ doing it for the warm fuzzy feeling you get by doing something nice. OSS and GNU/Linux are part of their business strategy. They are in it for the money. That they happen to help us geeks is certainly nice, but at the end of the day, Linux and such would survive anyway.
But if you really want to get them something fitting, how about some code?
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
In the end the big corporate winner of this story will be IBM. By first been a victim and then a defender and hero of the GPL they achieved the impossible: Removing the virtual big "EVIL" tattoo from their forehead and replacing it by the "GOOD KARMA" one.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Fortunately, because of the GPL, globalisation and the internet, GNU/Linux or some other functionally equivalent free OS will tend to survive, even if in the future IBM (for good business reasons) decides to change its stance.
IBM deals with a lot of hardware, so theres not a whole lot of doubt that they can keep their business moving on hardware -- much like Sun is doing -- while opening up software for development, which is actually a cost saving measure as well.
Think... people are writing your OS for you. As a company, thats an awesome deal.
Bitching aside, it is nice to have a real OVC (Original Villainous Company - IBM) show these wanna-bes how it's done.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
First IBM embraces Linux, then they position it as the next logical step from AIX, now they're standing up to, and trying to put an end to, SCO's harrassment. Additionally, IBM is doing a LOT of marketing of Linux. Plenty of traditional magazine and television ads are all over, and they clearly spell out the message that not only is Linux good for your business but IBM is the company that can successfully get you up and running. When companies like IBM put out that kind of marketing message it builds mindshare for the entire Linux community.
Let's not forget that Sun is beginning to do this. There are now full-page magazine ads appearing that feature StarOffice. However, these are of lesser interest to the Linux community in that the ads primarily benefit Sun without the broader appeal of the IBM ads. Still, adoption of StarOffice and OpenOffice will eventually make it easier to switch to Linux.
Another question is, "what do you think professional marketing' will bring to the table that Linux doesn't already have?" For instance, who in the United States does *not* already equate RedHat with Linux? You're unlikely to increase vendor/product identification in this case through traditional marketing (and RedHat is quite happy to pay for their own marketing). What you *might* do is increase market acceptance of Linux as a product. But IBM is already doing that. If your competitors' ads are working for you, why spend the dollars?
All in all it adds up to one of the old/stuff tech GIANTS backing the fledgling OS that could, Linux. Thanks IBM, let me start repricing those t41 thinkpads now...
CB!
free ipod and free gmail!
Next time you are in the market for linux server, use IBM hardware. That's what my company has done. The IBM hardware is rock solid so you're doing yourself a favour at the same time.
Will.
Don't forget, large corporations are amoral by nature, and any morality they display is either dictated by statute or is a side effect of their applying the profit motive. If IBM thought it made better business sense to side with SCO rather than mass against it, it would. Follow the money.
What you and other people with similar views seem to forget is that even very large companies are usually under the direction of a small handful of people - and sometimes the group is even smaller than that.
You paint IBM as a directionless ship, blowing where the wind will take it. But the very best companies do not just do what is strictly best for money's sake - instead they have some kind of vision and execute plans to take them there, even if they might leave a little money on the table in the process.
IBM has done exactly that. They have seen the big "Open Source" event horizion off in the distance, and they are placing themselves in the best position possible for a company to survicve (and thrive) in that kind of storm.
No matter how much money IBM might have made siding with SCO, they still would not have done so - because doing so is 180 degress aginst the vision they are going for. Companies that truly follow the money might be good for a short hop, but will never go the distance.
If you want examples of other companies that really act more as extensions of individuals (for good or ill) just look at Oracle, Sun, and even Microsoft.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Years ago, my then boss remarked that operating system software should be like the sewage system: only noticed on the rare occasions it fails. The sewage system is, in effect, Open Source: anyone can read the rules for designing it, and anyone who follows the rules can connect to it. They will have to pay to dispose of waste through it, but that's another matter. What they pay in taxes is the cost of provision, not an IP tax to the person who designed the system in the first placed.
Equally, anyone can read the plumbing codes. I don't have to pay a fee for intellectual property to Home Depot every time I want to put a shower in, or connect two pipe lengths.
On the other hand, Home Depot makes good money, and highly skilled plumbers installing big shower rooms do very nicely, thank you.
So I think this is where IBM wants to be. IBM wants, in effect, to put in really big and impressive bathrooms. It's easier to do this if someone else, who hardly has to be thought about, is taking care of the water supply and the sewage. It makes sense to give away some of your knowledge of infrastructure, because others will build on it and make your life easier.
I apologise (a bit) for the extended metaphor, but I think my understanding of the basic economics is right. SCO builds high priced sewage pipes and charges a premium for knowing how to do it. They also want everybody else who digs holes in the ground to pay them a tax. In doing this, they are trying to backflow (sorry) against the entire trend of technology development. IBM, in classic Adam Smith mode, look to their own advantage but, without intending to, benefit everybody.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
And thus do a lot of people take the stance that since a corporation is intended to be profitable, it will automatically assume an immoral stance to protect said profits.
However, corporations in a sense are not so different from most people. Most people exist for personal profit, whether monentary or otherwise. We live to better our own situation, often regardless of consequences to others. Look at how we treat the environment, or abuse "the system" to the detriment of others for personal benefit. By and large most people aren't mother Terasas, but neither are we completely immoral.
Corporations are ruled by profit yes, but that in itself is ruled by their customers. It's a balance of morality (or at least in public image) VS profit. Get caught doing too many immoral things, and the public image suffers, and profit goes down.
The problem of image can be solved in several manners:
a) Don't get caught
b) Try to stay on the clean and narrow, or at least limit those that are aware of what you're doing when you do stray
c) Try and find a business model that satisfies the most people while still remaining profitable
Now, we all know that things that push the limit of morality (and often legality) can often be profitable. Drugs (illegal) are profitable, and many varieties of pornography while profitable and/or legal are often rather repugnant except to those that would pay large sums...
IBM is currently taking a stance that is satisfactory to customers as well as the generality of those in the technical/linux market. In the end, their morality is imposed by their customers and partners. And in this case, your typical slashdotter may embody both (if not directly the customer, then perhaps the technical personal for the customer company).
So you can't call a company moral or immoral, because we are in the end the ultimate arbitrators of morality. In the end, a company is often representative of both its customers and partners.
When they started trying to charge people $699 for using code they've been distributing themselves under the GPL for years, you don't think that was maybe a breach of some kind?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you read the MSJ closely, IBM is actually saying: (emphasis added)
So this isn't really about the GPL--it's a simple copyright infringement issue. They're saying to the judge, "we own this code and SCO is distributing it without permission, so stop them".
On the other hand, they do go on to add:
So if SCO is going to mount a defense to this MSJ, they'll have to argue for the GPL, essentially countering their own earlier claims that the GPL is invalid and forcing them to tell the judge "uh, we were wrong". This isn't about IBM "testing" the GPL, it's about them grabbing two big boulders and squishing SCO between them. (:
If the GPL did end up being ruled on by the judge, about the only ruling I could see is that the GPL is valid and therefore SCO has not infringed IBM's copyrights--but IANAL, so what do I know?
"Still... I'm suspicious enough to wonder what their long-term (10+ year) plan for linux really is..."
Easy.
Here are the high points.
By making the operating system and other software open source you undercut MS. Less money MS has the less they can boss you around.
You concentrate on making good hardware especially mainframes where you are a market leader.
By boosting linux which can run on many platforms you undercut Intel and thereby giving your chip division chance to compete.
Continue to build up your services division because open source software needs lots of support.
Profit!!
Pretty simple actually.
evil is as evil does
IBM tried their best to stop clones. Eventually they were reverse-engineered, but they certainly didn't go willingly into the "IBM-compatible" era.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The GPL isn't really a license... it's mostly just an exception to copyright law
and copyright has been tested in court countless times. The name is bad... it
should be called the GNU Copyright Exception or something simliar but way more
clever. If I ask PJ to make a copy of one of her posts she has the option to say
yes, no, or only if you write it out with a quill pen using chicken blood. If I
choose to use cat blood then the deal's off and she can sue me for copyright
infringment.
I fail to understand why so many people don't understand this. I really didn't
and still don't understand why SCO's lawyers would try to invalidate the GPL
since it was their only defense for blatant and willfull copyright violations.
IBM's lawyers obviously got this though. If something happens and SCO doesn't
get kicked down hard it'll be the greatest travesty of justice ever.
Whatever man. It's a license. If the GPL is invalid then all software licenses are invalid including the EULAS.
EULAS because they restrict use as well as ban redistribution are more restrictive then the GPL. There is no way any court is going to declare the GPL to be invalid while holding any old EULA to be valid.
evil is as evil does
That would be the same IBM that explicitly developed the MCA bus as used in the PS/2 so they could take back control of the PC market?
I more or less agree with the principle of what you've said, but I'm not sure if this is a great example. Even if you and your landlord have never been to court, chances are that the lease agreement is either a clone or a very close copy of a standard and legally scrutinised agreement. It's likely that a similar template agreement has been used in thousands or more lease agreements, and probably that template has been tested in court many many times already.
Although the GPL is clear, concise and (we would hope) very straightforward, it's still out on it's own to a large extent. It's quite a different way of doing things from any software agreements that came before it (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), and it hasn't been tested. There seems to be quite an incentive to have it tested in court, too, if only to silence the people who might publicly dispute its validity for their own reasons.
If they lose because they repudiated the GPL (i.e. if the fact that they publicly claimed it's unenforcible, void, unconstitutional, etc.), then perhaps so, because that would seem to apply to all their other uses of GPL'd code. Still, I think the "repudiation" argument is the weaker of IBM's arguments, and I'm not sure it'll fly in court.
:)
If they lose for violating the GPL, and, in particular, for trying to charge people per-CPU fees for Linux, and for asking them to sign licenses agreeing not to use or distribute the source, then the answer is no. That's a violation of the kernel license, which just happens to be the GPL. It's not a violation of the licenses of any other software that may happen to be under the GPL, since they haven't tried to charge for or restrict the distribution of that other software. On the other hand, the violation claims should be a slam-dunk for IBM.
It helps to think of the GPL as boilerplate. The kernel has a license, gcc has a license, emacs has a license, etc., and they all just happen to use exactly the same words. Ordinarily, you can't actually "violate the GPL"; all you can do is violate a particular license that happens to be the GPL. It takes some really unusual (and spectacularly stupid) behavior to end up in violation of all the licenses of all software everywhere that uses the GPL. Before SCO came along, I would have said it was impossible. Now...I'm still not convinced it's possible, but if there was ever a company with the proper combination of chutzpah and stupidity to pull it off, it's SCO!
According to SCO's interpretation of IBM's contract with AT&T, the minute IBM added this code to UNIX it became part of UNIX and therefore it now belongs to SCO, not IBM. (Obviously this isn't true, but it's what the've been arguing all along.) SCO's response is obvious: They will claim all rights to the code in question on the grounds (however false) that IBM gave them all rights to the code under the original contract with AT&T..
But "robust" doesn't mean what "vigorous" means. The latter just means they are trying hard (to counter-claim), but the former includes Forbes' judgment that the counter-claim is solid.
:)
And those are very different. Yes, the whole article was pretty neutral, but it was just poor word choice, Forbes should be more careful with the opening remarks (because those are what most people read/remember)...
But I find it sligthly difficult to accept your explanation, even though I'm not with the tinfoil hatters. Forbes must have considered SCO's response as "robust" (rugged, durable) and I can't understand how's that.
Ah well, nobody browses at "0" anyway so don't mind an AC challenging your view
No. A vendor only has to make available the source code the people it has distributed binaries too. It can charge a suitable administration fee for doing so. It does not have to make the source code available free of charge to anyone who wants it. So if a vendor charge $1,000,000 for an application which is licenced to you under the GPL, they only need to supply the source code to those people who payed $1,000,000 for the application.
The point is that anybody who recieves the source code from the vendor can then redistribute it for free to anyone else if they want to.
I think you're confusing "in court" with "before a jury". IBM is most certainly causing the GPL to be considered by the court.
Whatever man. It's a license. If the GPL is invalid then all software licenses are invalid including the EULAS.
I doubt that the courts would agree with this. The invalidation of one type of license does not automatically invalidate all licenses. And the GPL is extremely different from EULAs. The GPL deals solely with granting permissions for activities that are prohibited by copyright law. EULAs generally involve placing restrictions on activities (not involving copyright) that are otherwise legal.
EULAS because they restrict use as well as ban redistribution are more restrictive then the GPL. There is no way any court is going to declare the GPL to be invalid while holding any old EULA to be valid.
There's no way the court is going to declare the GPL invalid at all, as copyright holders have the legal right to grant permission for people to distribute or modify their copyrighted works. But the rise or fall of the GPL will have no effect on EULAs.
In accusing IBM of copyright infringment, while being extremly sketchy on what was being infringed, SCO is now accused of infringing on IBM's copyrights. The only difference is IBM can pinpoint the code they own.
Who the hell at SCO _ever_ thought this would be anything but a disaster?
The major distinctions being: EULAs are generally "compulsory", in that you must agree to them simply to use the software (using the software, by itself, is a fair use right, so your rights are immediately curtailed), and EULAs usually place limitations on how you can use the software and what you may do to back the software up, usually giving you less rights than you started with.
People read the GPL like it's an EULA, but it isn't. The GPL basically says "Ok, you weren't allowed to do this, that, and the other, but we're going to let you do this and that." An EULA reads more like "You were able to do this, that, and the other, but we don't like that, so from now on you can only do this and the other, not that, and even then, when you do the other, you can only do it like ...".
The point I'm making is that simply because a license might get legally enforced or struck down, doesn't mean that License Agreements will be likewise. I'd say the odds are in favour of the GPL being held up, because it would be an obvious restriction of an artist's rights if it wasn't, but EULA's are another matter because they impose upon consumers and take rights away, and that should, when coupled with basic "First Sale Doctrine" type precendents, make them invalid in most cases.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I do read Slashdot, and that's almost as good, right?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Most of the time, corporations behave "morally" because that's the best long-term strategy (see tit-for-tat). If you have to deal with the same actors repeatedly, or if the actors can share information about you, your reputation as a fair dealer becomes more valuable than the profit you make off one raw deal.
Where morals come into play is when tit-for-tat doesn't apply - one of the dealers is much bigger than the other, or has an opportunity to crush the other without repercussions. Microsoft (to pick a random example) screws its partners primarily because it can.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Given, IBM can produce truckloads of bullshit. However! they are smart enough to NOT produce and/or apply said bullshit in court or in direct relation to said court.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Wow. Just browsing around at +4 takes my breath away.
Linus was my hero for a long time and is now just as much as ever.
But the reasons have changed. Or more lilely I am just now realizing what those reasons were all along. Linus is an awsome coder but more so he is a great manager. What else is there?
I never thought much of RMS one way or another. He was just another one of those geeks with acronym status who can't sing.
RMS deserves the credit for making Linus's success even possible. RMS is one of those great visionaries that will always be remembered, and I hope he reads this.