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1994 BSD/Unix Settlement Released On Groklaw
davidwr writes "Groklaw has the newly-released-previously-secret 1994 Berkeley/UNIX Systems Laboratories settlement which gave rise to BSD4.4(Lite) (as pdf and text with commentary). This may have an impact on the SCO vs. Linux war."
...does any of this in any way impact the slew of child BSD's out there? I would think Open/Net/Free have more to lose from some "revelation" due to this document than Linux.
It seems to me that there is a pretty big difference between this case and SCO's case against IBM. It looks like in this case, it was admitted that BSD contained some code that both parties admitted to, but the debate was over whether or not that code was ok to have in there. SCO on the other hand seems to be claiming ownership of code that may not even be there in the first place, or maybe I just missed something.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
SCO may or may not be claiming this is a contract case, not a copyright case. It's a bit hard to follow as their arguments are a bit incoherent. (Read a lot of Groklaw to understand this point, especialy stuff relating to IBM's request for a partial summary judgement on their 10th counterclaim) If it is about copyright, SCO appear to be claiming copyright on IBM's extensions to AIX, some of which probably are in Linux, but everybody except SCO seems to think that SCO has no rights over that code so it's OK. Which is much the same as your summary of the BSD/USL case.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
A little history lesson.
/<-rad commands like gopher wiretap.spies.com and zmodem phrack_15.tgz, which is what I and my fellow teenaged geeks were really looking to do. Some of my friends with whom I chose to use Linux, rather than BSD, have gone onto greatness, notably Nat Friedman of Ximian/Novell. (I, however, am an utter fucking nobody, which is fine. :)
For those of us accustomed to Unix and looking to run it on our desktops in the early 1990s, we found that there were very few options at the time. The popular choice was BSD, but those of us who read Boardwatch and kept up with the choice few Usenet groups knew only that there was some kind of a BSD lawsuit that made it bad to use. The details were fuzzy, but we thought that BSD would be a dead end.
Instead, we used Linux. It was much less popular, and way underpowered (compared to BSD), but it was unencumbered by lawsuits and would let us run all of those
I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today. Instead, Linux is far more popular -- I continue to use it a decade later, with the vague guilt that I would be cooler if I were running BSD. I wonder to what degree the SCO FUD is similarly affecting the choice of Linux today?
-Waldo Jaquith
If you look at the BSD family tree here, you'd see that at one point in time, all Free/Net/Open BSD changed to use the codebase from 4.4BSD Lite, the unencumbered version.
I once had a signature.
What with Solaris's recent still-mysterious "open sourcing", the large amount of cash infused into SCO by Sun Microsystems, the increasingly common yet always vague claims by Sun executives that "intellectual property issues" will become of increasing importance in software development in the near future, and the strange repeated claims by Sun executives that Linux "wouldn't have happened" if Solaris had been "open sourced" five years ago...
One wonders if Sun Microsystems might be hoping that the SCO suit will drive people from Linux to Solaris the same way that the USL suit drove people from BSD to Linux.
The difference is that the USL/BSD "FUD" was a lot more substantial than SCO's fantasyland FUD.
I'm sure that's true, but I use the term "FUD" not in the pejorative sense, but instead in the literal one: there was fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the wisdom of using BSD, at least in the mind of this then-15-year-old.
-Waldo Jaquith
According to you, more people were using BSD despite the lawsuit.
More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. The Linux kernel hadn't even gone 1.0. It was under 1MB. It wasn't a matter of the lawsuit -- it was that Linux was unknown.
Moreover, you do not consider the very real philosophical difference between the BSD and GNU people.
What you mean is that I did not (past tense) consider the philosophical differences. And you're right -- I was totally uninterested. We didn't have "open source" -- the phrase didn't exist. We had free software. Both BSD and Linux were free. Both had source to edit. What teenager cared about some contract?
I'll wager that many of your peers made the choice based on the philisophical grounds.
My older friends surely chose based on philosophical grounds -- those old enough to be in any way interested in IP and related freedoms. I was writing for 2600 and decompiling and modifying MS-DOS for fun -- wasn't no contract going to stop me from doing whatever I wanted with an OS, or so I figured.
But you were the man on the spot, you tell me, was it impending abuse and the desire to not aid the abusers as obvious then as it is now?
I'm afraid that I'm not sure that I understand your question. But perhaps it would answer your question to restate my premise: we had no idea what the deal was with the lawsuit. Abuse schmabuse -- we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?
-Waldo Jaquith
SCO has been having a road show in the UK. As it happens, a Groklaw reader attended, and this individual reported to me that one of the speakers, in a talk about intellectual property risks in Linux and how you shouldn't use it in business as a result, mentioned me by name, and twisted my relationship with OSRM to say that it proved that I believe there are substantial IP risks in Linux.
That is nonsense, of course. It actually means the opposite, if anything. I was never involved in the insurance side of OSRM anyway. But I take it seriously that they are using my work relationship for FUD purposes. There was also the Ballmer FUD to factor in. I have thought about it carefully for a couple of days and brainstormed some. There is a scripture that says the heart is desperate, meaning it wants what it wants and tries to find a way to justify what it wants, and I'm only human. No one likes to separate themselves from an income stream if they don't have to. I tried to justify to myself maintaining the status quo. The FUD is unfair, but it doesn't matter. FUD is always unfair. One must simply deal with it. In analyzing my choices, I kept coming back to the same thing. If my working for OSRM is doing harm by creating FUD possibilities, I need to remove that issue. Money is nice, but integrity is everything.
So, I have resigned.
OSRM were extremely gracious about it. Down the road, when there's nothing left of SCO but an old blues song, perhaps we'll be able to work together again. But for now, I decided to try to find other work.
I have spoken with ibiblio about the UNIX/Linux Ownership History Timeline, and they have kindly agreed to host it. I love ibiblio.
Can you think of any other mechanism, other than registering the settlement with the judge, who decides whether it (or parts) can be sealed, for how long? And if sealed, how does someone unseal it to stop someone from violating it? And how do I, a third party, even violate an agreement between the original two parties, to which I am not a party, let alone even seen? How can we combine practical disclosure and the right of private parties to retain commercially useful secrecy?
--
make install -not war
Drugs exist. They won't cease existing. Lost this one.
No, we (they?) haven't lost this one. This isn't a war that you just "stop fighting" when you've "won". The drugs will keep fighting to exist, so society has to keep fighting the war forever if society chooses not to have drugs everywhere.
I used to not grok the war on drugs. I've done a few "light" drugs myself and never understood what the big deal was. Last April I thought I was getting a great deal on a house until I found out why the seller had priced it $30K below market - the house next door was infested with dealers and users. Guys doing crazy uppers - out shouting at each other every night at the top of their lungs until 4AM, going "MOTHERFUCKER MOTHERFUCKING UP IN MY SHIT SO I CHOKED THE BITCH OUT" and stupid nonsenese so loud it would shake my (closed, heavy 2-pane) windows. Then there were the fights. Then there were were ODs. That's when I learned real quick why we have a war on drugs. BTW this is in Campbell, CA - not the most expensive homes in the bay area, but certainly not the ghetto!
For months I talked to other neighbors who were all too afriad to give their names when the called the police - they were afraid they'd get shot, or their houses burned down if they complained. I'd call the cops but they always said they couldn't go in on a noise complaint, no matter how many.
So I tracked down the local drug enforcement czar, and he told me what to do. Keep a log, write down license plates, call the cops every time it gets out of hand. So I did, and I gave my name every time I called. It didn't help.
Finally I discovered that public records could point me to the owner of the rented property (the police and the occupants had refused to tell me). I started writing letters and telling the owner everything that happened - turned out the owners were the parents of one of the occupants. They'd given up on parenting and bought their son a house because they couldn't keep him under control and they wouldn't throw him out on the street. Great.
I researched the law and learned about the seizure process and how the owners could lsoe everything by letting it continue, and that neighbors could sue for noise. I bluntly informed them of all this, and finally it looks like the creeps are moving out - 8 months of turmoil later. Finally I have peace and safety.
You will not understand the war on drugs until you've had to fight it yourself. Only then will you see why it's a war that we are going to keep fighting forever as long as we as a society decide we don't want to be around the stuff.