Slashdot Mirror
Open Source As Legal Time Bomb
Hwyman writes "TechWorld is reporting on the latest attack on open-source software by the Microsoft-backed Alexis de Toqueville Institution (ADTI). Many here will remember ADTI's previous assertion that Linux Torvald was NOT the true father of the Linux kernel. Taking the stance that OSS is in conflict with IP law, ADTI president Kenneth Brown states, 'After a brief glance at much open source software development, it becomes readily apparent that a number of open source practices directly conflict with best practices associated with protecting intellectual property.' With references like 'open sores software,' it's easy to believe that ADTI might be somewhat biased."
Linus Torvald..
I doubt if anyone takes these people seriously.
If anyone does, well, they're just not too bright to start with.
While they may be biased, and slant their findings, the concept of 'a problem' is valid.
Even if nothing ever comes to light from IP/patent problems, it can ( and is ) keeping some companies away from adoption of anything open source out of fear of lawsuits.
Remember, even if you win, the fight can easily cost you enough to put you out of business..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
If the AdTI were in any way objective, I would welcome their criticism. But, having seen their lies many, many times over the past couple of years, I know that it is hopeless. It is one thing to leverage criticism, but someone whose sole interest is to see the demise of Linux is not someone I am going to allow to influence -any- of my corporate decisions.
Let's see what happened in the last few days:
What's next? SCO will publish another inane series of press releases on its latest strategic re-deployment?
It's FUD, people. Nothing new here. Move along. Film at 11, and could the last person out of the building please shut down the lights? Thanks.
Sheeesh. They should have figured it out by now. What do they teach MBAs these days anyway?
Seriously, though, this is another attempt by a really worried company to smear the competition. A clue for Microsoft: it did not work for IBM. It won't work for you.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Unfortunately there is a point here. The non-traceability of the Open Source process leaves any given product open to contamination from copyrighted/patented IP. Most projects don't have tight checking of who did what, and they definitely don't know where the contributor got the input. That is an invitation for trouble. Worse, a project could have an "IP bomb" placed inside it by an agent of a less than scrupulous SCO, er... proprietary company that wants to stir up trouble later.
On the good side, it is a problem that is easily fixed. Traceability of the code base back to the contributor can be implemented, but it means some sort of centralized repository AND use of good tracking tools. IMO, no major distribution, and definitely no kernel, should leave the foundry without knowing who touched it.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Give someone a computer, some time, and some programming skills, and they can empower themselves for FREE - that is, without compensating anyone else that somehow manages to lay claim to what they've created. They can also decide to empower others by sharing what the've created. How can any law sanely deny someone what seems to me, to be such a fundamental freedom?
Posting this on Slashdot is just feeding the ADTI troll. Effective advocacy isn't about dealing with every troll lobbed your way. If these guys really had a legal time bomb they'd use it as a basis litigate. It isn't as though people today ever really show restraint when they think they have a cause (however dodgy) that will stand up in court.
sponsorships for funding of libel suits against such slanderers.
Recall what Mozilla firefox got for advertising!
And of course it'd be done thru EFF...
proceeds of the winning would of course go towards sponsoring FOSS works. In fact sponsorship of such a case might included what project you'd like your return percentage to go to...
...it really should be named the Alexis de FUDville Institute.
"Legal time bomb" my ass.
"best practices associated with protecting intellectual property"
Like frivolous patents, astroturf, monopoly lobbying, and, most important, funding the AdTI. Yep, Linux and most "open source" projects don't do any of that stuff.
--
make install -not war
Why play their game? Closed source by it's nature is competitive. Why does everyone feel a burning need to prove that linux is superior. Don't play these games.
Lets not fight, use and develop linux, and leave the fools to use inferior closed source products.
You're giving the man waaaaay too much credit. Let's look at what he wrote again:
employees beholden to strict employee/invention/intellectual property agreements, in their spare time (and even during work-hours) freely give away ideas, code, and products to open source projects
It's just a venomous insinuation and nonsense. These employees (untold amounts of them) are giving away whose ideas, code, and products? We're meant to believe the employer's IP, but he can't come out and say directly: "Hey, big corporations, your employees are stealing your IP," because then he'd actually have to back up his words.
This is all a smear campaign. Make vile insinuations, prove nothing.
Your mistake is to take him at face value, and to try counter arguments. I say, DON'T! Instead, let's get him to support his allegations. Guess what? He can't!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It seems they liked Kerry in the last election. A couple of quotes from the article:
... Mr. Kerry has put himself firmly in the camp of presidents from Reagan to Roosevelt, from Kennedy to Truman. These men insisted -- to a chorus of elite skepticism from both the left and right -- that, yes, democracy could triumph."
When President Bush first mused, just before his party's convention, that the war on terror might be unwinnable...
Seriously, how are republicans any different from democrats?
Brown finds it "intriguing" that many open-source contributors work for large IT companies. "Every day, an untold amount (sic) of employees beholden to strict employee/invention/intellectual property agreements, in their spare time (and even during work-hours) freely give away ideas, code, and products to open source projects," he writes. This opens up questions around the legal ownership of contributions...
There's no conflict with people contributing to open-source projects while employed by business firms. When you agree to assign IP to your employer as a condition of working for him, the employer becomes the legal owner of what you create. (Why is that so hard for everyone to understand?) The best companies have no problem contributing their code to the community because it benefits them in the end. Most big companies are wary of using open-source technology because they can't afford to be without support. The smartest ones know that they can anchor their own communities, especially around the more specialized and vertical software applications. The stupid companies are the ones asking "How am I going to protect my investment if I don't keep this stuff secret?"
Because most law makers are interested in controlling power. People can't just go around haphazardly GIVING empowerment. And if they have something worthy, then someone wants to control it by whatever ridiculous means they can think of.
Rhetoric is a dangerous weapon and we should be cautious. If they say it often enough, people really will begin to believe it despite it being completely preposterous.
No, it's a bit worse than that. If you're named after Alexis de Tocqueville, and you're in favor of "civil liberties, political equality, and economic freedom and opportunity", but you're against open source, you must be...
Misnamed. And lying about what you stand for.
It's more like someone who claims to be speaking for the Democrats talking about how the unions are damaging businesses...
It's going to take more court wins to substantiate the GPL
...
Which is going to take a while yet. But I don't suppose you've felt the need to try and analyze why there hasn't been a truely precedent setting court case just yet, have you?
Think about those that have been through what passes for our legal system, and try and explain why it is that they've not went down to the wire and had a judges opinion rendered so it gets into recorded case law.
Go ahead, I've got a bit of time while you cogitate on the subject of the relative lack of suitable precedent setting cases....
.
.
.
.
.
.
Have you got it figured out yet? No?
Here is a hint: What do most folks do when they know they've been had?
They try to deal their way out of the corner, hopefully with their shirt still on their back, right? The natural tendency to 'cut your losses' usually results in the violating party agreeing to comply with the terms of the license and reaching a settlement, at which point the court case dissolves on both sides to cut the monetary losses in paying all those attorneys & costs. And therefore the precedent setting decision is never rendered. I don't see that the GPL is toothless like some loudly proclaim, because everytime somebodies legal help sits down to see what it is they are up against, the legal teams advice going back to the boardroom, in very firm words, is to comply, which is usually the settlement agreed to, and cut your losses while you still have something to lose.
Make sense yet? If not, go back to the top and re-read, until it does.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
If Alexis de Toquevill were alive and realized what these shitheads were doing in his name, he'd probably barf out his heart.
Here's a quote from the real Alexis de Toqueville about the tendencies of American's to help each other out:
"I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another."
Sounds pretty different from the message of these bought-off scumbags.
I suspect the reason that no FOSS has been sued for patent infringement is that the patent holders fear that they would lose. IBM and Novell have bet the farm on FOSS. They have no choice but to make sure that open source survives.
By utterly crushing tSCOg, IBM is making it very clear that anyone who threatens the viability of open source is in serious trouble.
No, it's more like telling that average driver:
"If something goes wrong on your car and you want to look under the hood, be my guest. If not, you can go to any mechanic you want to try to fix it -- you don't have to go back to the dealer and take their word as to what's wrong with your car."
Y|
libertarians and intellectual "property" don't mix. Anyone calling himself a libertarian and supporting copyright and patent monopolies is a hypocrite.
Even if laws don't exist yet to kill Open Source, the laws are coming if they threaten the big corporations.
When this happens, the open source community in the developed world will continue what they're doing quietly. Their code development won't stop: it will just not be implemented into businesses in the developed world (i.e. any country where the lawyers have more money than the industrialists).
However in the developing world, corporate lawyers don't have enough money to retard the development of industries that have the potential of making bigger payoffs to the politicians than the corporate lawyers do. In other words, the open source programs will be adopted by businesses and industries in the developing world regardless of the quasi-legal roadblocks that Microsoft uses to prevent OS use by businesses in the wealthy countries.
In countries that are rich enough to allow businesses to have the resources to both pay off the politicians and buy legal copies of Microsoft applications, businesses will allow Microsoft to control the laws applicable to open-source programs. In countries where businesses can't afford to pay off the politicians and buy legal Microsoft aps, the local governments will refuse to allow Microsoft to use the government's legal structures for that company's sole gain because the local politicians know that in the long run they will get more money in pay-offs from business that are using open-source software than they will from Microsoft.
When you can grasp the pay-off structures, then you can understand the how the law will be interpreted and applied in most situations.
There is nothing majestic and omnipresent about the Law. Underneath all the rhetoric about justice and order, the law is merely a means to facilate the flow of money to those who control the application of violence in a society. If they feel that you are not sending enough money their way, then they will direct their control of violence your way. This is the fundamental guiding principle of how the world works.
This applies in the developed world even more than the developing world, but in developed countries these primal forces are better hidden through patents, copyrights, and academic consultants.
Something I noticed from http://www.adti.net/background/mission.html
Paragraph 1:
ADTI: Since 1988, the Alexis de' Tocqueville Institution has studied the spread of perfection of democracy around the world.
BjL: Most open source pundits do not believe that perfection is something to be attained through democracy.
ADTI: In this, we follow the principles of Tocqueville himself, while claiming no unique mandate to represent them. Among these liberal ideas are civil liberty, political equality, and economic freedom and opportunity.
At the root, perhaps, is a populist belief in the basic goodness, perfectibility, and nobility of mankind and the human community.
BjL: I simply do not buy or agree with their seemingly objective, however quite positive self-assessment in paragraph two.
It is my experience the open source community tends to have an entirely antithetical epistemological structure to the to the structure expressed by ADTI.
It also seems to me as though the open source community does more to advance the 'human community' through their nearly postmodern approach to technology than ADTI does through stoically expressing their 'liberal' views as fact.
From the article:
Most worrying of all is the absence of litigation around open-source projects, Brown says.
Wow. If that's not an indictment of the thinking of these sorts of people, the nature of our society, and the assumptions behind what people say about IP, then I don't know what is.
If people aren't getting sued, then something must be wrong, eh? My god, what a depressing thought.
-Rob
All he has are allegations, no facts. He constructs his argument around the idea that "many open-source contributors work for large IT companies" and therefore there has to be a potential for copyright IP abuse, simple on the basis of statistical probability that such cross-over would have to occur. Nonetheless, he doesn't give any facts. None, zero. Then he goes on to point out that OSS is a ticking bomb before some serious court case will blow it up. Well, good news is that in court there would have to be some hard evidence and facts, allegations is not enough, not even close, especially in software cases where someone would have to show that copyrighted code was used, abused, etc. No code, no case, in my opinion, and no worry so far as the case with SCO shows, the case which is in big trouble for the lack of evidence.
IP was invented for the sake of lawsuits.
I used to dismiss this type of thinking as paranoid whining. However, as I get older I'm becoming more and more libertarian, and I'm now convinced that even the most well-intentioned congressmen just don't know when the fuck to stop. And then there are assclowns like Ted Stevens, who thinks the FCC ought to be able to regulate profanity on cable. Such hackery is bipartisan; Tipper Gore was notorious for this, and Hillary seems determined to carry on the good fight.
The frequent attacks on open-source as "communism" only hold true to the extent that RMS has more or less admitted that he'd like to outlaw closed-source software. And I've seen posters here claim that copyright is immoral and I should write software for the betterment of humanity. In the context of our current system, however, it's 100% compatible with capitalism. Everyone has a choice whether or not they want to contribute, or whether they want to use the products. If the software or business model is superior, it'll succeed because of that, not because the government is forcing anyone to use it. And if conventional software companies go bankrupt because of competition from the open-source movement, fuck 'em. The free market's a bitch. Learn to love it.
I can't understand why anyone, except the unexpecting, would even take Brown or ADTI seriously at this point, given the ludicrous and obviously false statements that have been making.
Face it ADTI: you are nothing more than unethical Microsoft whores.
Why does everyone feel a burning need to prove that linux is superior
Among the people performing quality development of open source software at this time are for-profit companies that have found a way to work open source into their business model.
If the enemies of open source can find a way to put these companies at an unfair disadvantage with customers through paid public slander, open source will indirectly suffer as a result of their problems.
I think most of the possible "fight" responses, as you put it, to this sort of thing are unlikely to be meaningfully productive. But it's definitely worth caring about.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts