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.'

Comments

That's expected!

[bogaboga]

...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)...

Sounds reasonable to me!

I prefer illegal linux

[Lumpy]

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?

Re:I prefer illegal linux

[AlanS2002]

If IP laws had existed when the weel was invented we probably wouldn't have motor cars now.

Re:I prefer illegal linux

[ArsenneLupin]

The patent on the wheel would have long expired... oh wait, it hasn't!

Re:I prefer illegal linux

[msuarezalvarez]

Tired of waiting for working video editing in linux.....

What have you done to shorten the wait?

Your .sig

[Salsaman]

Tired of waiting for working video editing in linux.....

Your wait is over.

Re:Your .sig

[Curunir_wolf]

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%.

So much for that!

[EricJ2190]

One of the things I liked about Linux was the fact that it did not have so many legal issues.

What is this crap?

[Werrismys]

"Legal Linux?" F**k this shit.

I'll start distributing "Vista - The Non Child Molester version". All the other Vista versions are pedobear-approved.

I take responsibility!

[EvilRyry]

"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.

Reversal.

[Lethyos]

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.

Re:Reversal.

[Jerf]

Why is open source software more likely to contain stolen code than any product from Microsoft or Oracle or any other proprietary vendor?

Don't be confused; this isn't really about stolen code or violated patents.

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.)

Indemnification

[kevin_conaway]

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:

Oracle will offer its Linux support customers full indemnification from intellectual property lawsuits, like the ones filed by SCO.

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

Re:Indemnification

[msuarezalvarez]

the linked article came off as kind of nitpicking

The guy is analysing a legal agreement, in particular its Limitation of Liability section. Nitpicking is required and, in fact, is the important thing.

Re:What bits in the Linux kernel ..

[eln]

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.

Oracle's own legal standpoint for GPL attributions

[dustwun]

At some point oracle should take a look at their own legal standpoint and community reputation (if Larry Ellison cares about that).
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.html 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.
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/uncompat 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

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.

Ah!

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

Then I have exactly the amount of indemnification I need.

Re:Oracle's own legal standpoint for GPL attributi

[mr_mischief]

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.

So you don't

[novus ordo]

This is not indemnity against bugs. This is indemnity against patent issues.

MS for example takes no responsibility for just about anything that could happen with their products.

From an IP perspective, seems that they do. And it also seems pretty extensive. From here:

It is also now providing OEM system builders with protection for the four major forms of disputes commonly associated with software, which are patent, copyright, trade secret, and trademark.

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?

Look what Oracle did to Apache

[bobs666]

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?

Re:What bits in the Linux kernel ..

[Anonymous Coward]

What bits in the Linux kernel does Larry think violates someones patent.

0 and 1 bits.

Open Source indemnification is FUD

[GodWasAnAlien]

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.

Re:What bits in the Linux kernel ..

[Pharmboy]

Please see: Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros

Re:Oracle's own legal standpoint for GPL attributi

[Kjella]

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).

Re:Oracle's own legal standpoint for GPL attributi

[greg1104]

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.