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A Closer Look At Oracle's (Legal) Linux
A reader wrote to us with Matt Asay's Infoworld piece digging into the legal background of Oracle's indemnification offerings for Linux. Turns out, things are not quite so rosy as PR would make it seem. I know, I know...suprise all around. You can read Oracle's FAQ about it, but some of the tastier bits are that the indemnification covers *just* the kernel, and that whole thing about damage limits? Read what Matt has to say:'The indemnification is not in any way limited to the amount of money a customer has paid Oracle.
Apparently, Oracle's legal department missed the memo on this one. If you read Section J of the agreement (Limitation of Liability), you'll note that while Oracle offers unlimited indemnification for consequential damages related to an infringement claim (and that only for the one package, the Linux kernel), it caps all other damages at the amount you pay to Oracle.'
I'm done with it all. If my linux is "illegal" then I might as well pirate the hell out of all software and share it with everyone I know. IP law is stupid and broken if linux is illegal.
Who cares about Oracle linux. Redhat AS is damn good, Centos is a great free copy, and Ubuntu and the others are awesome for home/tinker/easy to use... How can they come so late to the game and even get near what redhat and Debian have done?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"We take responsibility for any and all damages that could possibly happen as a result of any bug in our products. For example, you can sue us into the ground because a kernel bug ate your multi-billion dollar document or allowed an intruder in who stole trade secrets. " With love, EvilRyry Enterprise Linux Systems, Inc. Honestly, what do you expect. Any company will take pretty limited responsibility for their product, not just oracle. Even a small bug could be the death of the company. MS for example takes no responsibility for just about anything that could happen with their products.
Let me preface this by saying I have no idea what I'm talking about and this is all guesswork. Then again, this is Slashdot..anyways:
Looking back at a previous story, they mention:
Weren't most of the SCO lawsuits stating that only the Linux kernel contained their IP? Perhaps this is what Oracle had in mind when only offering to cover the kernel for purposes of indemnification.
Either way, I'm not very knowledgeable on the topic, but the linked article came off as kind of nitpicking
If he thought there was a lot of patent infringement in the Linux kernel he wouldn't be offering indemnification. Nobody offers insurance against something if they thing that something is very likely to happen.
The indemnification thing is for executives that got spooked by the SCO debacle.
At some point oracle should take a look at their own legal standpoint and community reputation (if Larry Ellison cares about that).l and search for centos. If you really want to have some fun, grab the centos source, and start matching the typos in the centos patches against the 'oracle developed' patches in their source.t ible-linux/ http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/29/do-it-ri ght-oracle/ and http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2006/10/oracle-lookin g-past-ellisons-rhetoric.html
Some basic facts for people to be aware of:
1. Dubious rebuild practices: They seem to be using centos as a buffer to Red Hat. See http://oss.oracle.com/linux/legal/oracle-list.htm
2. Dozens of bloggers and community members are already calling it a failure. see the following for your current opinion: http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompa
Oracle seems to be walking a very fine line with overall compliance with the GPL. They have taken some patches from centos and removed the user attribution.
Personally, CentOS http://www.centos.org/ has already proven to be a top notch alternative to RHEL, and while there's no indemnification, it works far better than oracle linux seems to at this point, and they provide more community support than oracle seems to want to.
They're not doing this because they truly think Open Source is a festering pile of stolen code; if they did, they'd be suing. How to determine motivation from actions: The question is not whether motivation A "explains" action B, the question is whether given motivation A, is action B the best action? Given the belief that open source has a lot of stolen code, the "best action" would be a lawsuit blitz. Since they aren't doing that and are just trying to sow FUD, my conclusion is they do not believe that open source has a lot of stolen code. The motivation that matches is that they want to hobble open source; in that case, this is [what they believe is] their best action.
Business IT may not always be the most tech savvy people, but they are business savvy; this is going to work for a while but you can only talk about vague patent violations for so long before they notice that if they were real you'd be actually suing. That makes this a fairly pathetic attack; eventually everybody is going to see through it and they'll have spent real credibility on this last-ditch effort.
This is coming up because as pathetic as it is for that reason, it's the best attack they've got. RMS deserves some props for this, and anyone else who helped design and promote the copy-left ideal; it's a brilliant judo-flip on the copyright system. They can't invalidate Open Source licensing without also taking out their own licensing practices.
(Which is also why you see so many people trying to invalidate it on the grounds that they didn't have to pay money for it, as it, too, is the only available legal attack, and it doesn't work, because even if it works it doesn't mean GPL software is "public domain" in the full legal sense, it means it's a copyrighted work you have now no rights to possess or distribute. Oops.)
It's not about stolen code, it's about trying to find some way, any way to slow down open source. ("Stopping" it is almost certainly an unrealistic goal and I doubt they are really trying that, as I think in that case "best action" swings back to "lawsuit flurry", in the desperate hope that maybe they can win something important.)