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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.'
One of the things I liked about Linux was the fact that it did not have so many legal issues.
How is it not obvious to, well, everyone that this is a bunch of nonsense? Why is open source software more likely to contain stolen code than any product from Microsoft or Oracle or any other proprietary vendor? (It is not, of course, because it is easy to find.) Like most matters of “intellectual property” the reasoning is totally inverted. We should have indemification licenses for closed source software, not open.
Why bother.
There's really not a fine line. If they're actually removing author attributions, they are in full-blown violation of the license. It may be overlooked by some, but if they did it on purpose and continue to do it, Eben Moglen, RMS, and those authors themselves certainly won't overlook it for long.
From an IP perspective, seems that they do. And it also seems pretty extensive. From here: Apparently this is nothing new in the arena. Companies use shady patent laws to create 'protection' rackets providing insurance. I guess this is to protect from patent trolls by pooling a lot of patents in one lot. Most companies cross-license patents instead of litigation making an even bigger pool(see IBM). Ironic considering what patents were designed to do, don't you think?
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Last Week I was trying to install a mod into Oracle's 10g web server.
running apxs was hope less. The version of perl that Oracle shipped
included libraries that did not exist. How good is it that "use strict"
would not load, And after switching that perl , oracles apxs wanted
to load *.o files that Oracle did not ship. In effect Oracle's version
of Apache will only work with software shipped by Oracle. And
the perl software and libraries shipped by Oracle are useless.
I have to ask my self why Oracle shipped them in the first place.
When they do that to a Linux distro I expect a computer that can only
run Oracle software. How useless will that be?
Open source indemnification is FUD that was started by SCO.
As an individual, you will not be sued for using Linux.
If you are a mega company, and you resell Linux, perhaps someone will lodge a "trivial patent" lawsuit or other lawsuit at you.
But that could happen with other software that you re-license. And that's what the lawyers are for. And hopefully patent laws get fixed someday.
They can remove ANYTHNG THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE because that is what the GPL license allows for.
Any of the source. Removing any part of the license or the license grant means that this user's contribution is no longer licensed, period. Every person who contributes to a GPL'd file is making a derivative work and has joint copyright on the derivative version. They must be identified and also grant a license under the GPL. In fact, removing copyright notices is itself a criminal offense under copyright law. And if you replace it with your own you can be sued for fraud. Plus probably $750/file in statutory damages for copyright infringement (hey, if a 99c song is a work, so's a source file).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're kidding, right? Lives is the biggest PITA for editing video that I've ever seen. A single DV tape is about 18GB of space. I don't know if Lives can load up the whole thing or not, but after a couple of hours of waiting on my AMDX2/ATI X1600 box I gave up. Pick a few 2-3 minute clips and you can throw something together suitable for youtube - anything more ambitious and you might as well forget it. Cinelerra is a better option, but it has almost as many broken features as lives. Don't even get me started on the hoops you have to go through for DVDAuthor to burn an actual DVD. And although I *used* to be able to burn DVDs just fine on my linux box - nice, reliable DVDs that would play anywhere, my new install (Gentoo AMD64) only burns DVDs that can be played on PCs and a few standalone players - and not at all on either my component Pioneer DVDRecorder or my Panasonic DVD player. What's with that, anyway? I do a lot of videos, and in the past I've spent a lot of time booting back and forth between Windows and Linux because neither did everything I wanted very good, but at this point Ulead Video Studio (version 8) does about 95% of it. Not counting the little bit of duplicated functionality, Lives does 0%.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
At some point oracle should take a look at their own legal standpoint and community reputation (if Larry Ellison cares about that).
He doesn't.
Dozens of bloggers and community members are already calling it a failure
He also doesn't care about what people named Mookie or BS think, either. Whether it's a failure or not will come out on Oracle's next quarterly report, or maybe a few after that; you can't rule out the possibility that this is a loss-leader aimed at expanding Oracle market share. Every dollar that isn't paid to RedHat could be used to get a Oracle product instead.
Here's what I got out of your links, which were quite helpful with facts but slightly fuzzy with their conclusions from where I sit:
1) Oracle's Linux is at the moment a slightly broken copy of CentOS, and shouldn't be bothered with yet. I don't think this really matters. The people Oracle wants to sell this product to aren't the kind to install the first release, anyway; my guess is that what the bloggers are being used for is product beta testing, which they seem happy to help out the company with.
2) RedHat couldn't deliver a product this cheap on their scale of operations. So what? That doesn't answer whether or not Oracle can leech their work, re-skin it (either directly or indirectly), and then sell it at that price with the economy of scale their enormous operation has. You can bet that Oracle execs are world-class experts on how to manage a tech support operation in a way that keeps costs under control, lessons RedHat certainly didn't have a mature view of yet during the time period discussed by your second link.
This whole thing is just posturing right now; I'm going to wait until at least the second major revision from them before making premature judgements.