Legal Summits to Tackle Linux

An anonymous reader writes "BuilderAU has the story that the Linux Foundation, custodians of the Linux trademark, have announced that they will host two summits to deal with legal issues surrounding Linux and open-source software. Attendance at the first summit will be restricted to members of the Linux Foundation and their legal counsel. The second summit — an open meeting — will be held in Autumn 2008 where legal experts from any background will be able to attend."

Comments

Against the spirit...

[Enderandrew]

...the spirit of the GPL was to keep software free so that the source code can't be made proprietary (such as what happened with Microsoft swallowing pieces of BSD like you stated). Linus very much supports that clause, and has always spoken in favor of the GPLv2. I'm curious why you suggest he is against the spirit of the GPLv2. The only anti-GPL statements I've seen him make are in regards to GPLv3, in that he doesn't think a software license should govern or have anything to do with hardware.

Re:Against the spirit...

[Aladrin]

No, the spirit of the GPL was to ensure that anyone who benefits from the code returns any upgrades they make to it.

BSD software cannot 'be made proprietary'. The original code will ALWAYS be available under the BSD.

If Linus had chosen BSD License, Microsoft would not have 'swallowed' Linux. It may have improved Windows with it, and may even have ended up with a better system than Linux, but absolutely no real harm would have come to Linux itself.

Re:Against the spirit...

[TheRaven64]

Google : Has made full use of the community built code and made proprietary extensions; without contributing a single bit; since they aren't distributing it. This is not against the spirit of the GPL. The GPL is designed to ensure that the code remains free, and that no one receives a derived work of the original without the accompanying rights. Not distributing changes is entirely allowed under the GPL, and endorsed by the FSF. Google has contributed a huge amount to Free Software. The Summer of Code alone accounts for an incredible amount of time spent on Free Software, and a lot of Google employees use their 20% time to work on Free Software projects (the Mac port of FUSE, for example, was one of these).

HP : The company which kicked Bruce Perens out, built winprinters and winmodems on their Windows PCs, kindly took over Compaq and destroyed their Unix offerings. Compaq had UNIX offerings? HP have made a lot of mistakes in recent years (killing the Alpha, marginalising VMS, etc). Perhaps you are thinking of Digital; they pretty much killed of Tru64. They still offer HP-UX and Linux machines, however, and fund development on a number of Free Software projects (Xen, for example).

IBM: Despite the SCO fiasco, they still maintain both AIX and Linux offerings, and have not clearly indicated which way they will go. Also, they are behind TCPA, TPM chips and DRM as well. They employ a number of developers to work full time on Linux, Xen, and recently OpenOffice.org, as well as a few other projects. But, I suppose, since they still sell a proprietary UNIX as well, they are evil.

Novell : Need I say more? They provoked a version upgrade to the GPL2 by their sleazy dealings and destroyed a decent distro, namely SuSE. After kindly enacting a suicide of their own Novell Netware. Bought SuSE and open sourced YaST, employ a few kernel devs, a lot of GNOME devs, and are the second largest contributor to OpenOffice.org. Definitely evil.

Re:Against the spirit...

[Enderandrew]

You're honestly suggesting that Google, HP, IBM and Novell don't contribute code?

Re:Against the spirit...

[Afecks]

It is when that code is de facto offered to the public as software for them to use. The point of the GPL is that the user of a piece of software shall always be free to modify that software as he sees fit so that he can maximize its usefulness to him. If Google offers, say, a spreadsheet application that is largely server-based and uses the server-side loophole to avoid distributing the source, then they violate this principle since the user obviously cannot change the way that it works. The same is true for a search engine, of course, but this case seems a little more muddled. Said spreadsheet application is not being distributed, the results of the application are. The input/output scheme is no different than any other Web 2.0 site. User inputs data, server does something with data, server outputs data. It seems you want to get into some metaphysical debate about the fine line between executing, hosting and distributing software.

It's no different in principle than a website using Apache/mySQL to serve some HTML or using GNU/Linux to host any kind of service. It's not distributing. You get nothing. You lose. Good day sir.

Invite the Slashdot crowd

[Chapter80]

Open Source summits, great! I imagine that the most frequently heard phrase at the summits will be "IANAL,..."

Re:Invite the Slashdot crowd

[Nerdfest]

There will however, be lots of real lawyers there. I understand the logo for the summit features a penguin shaking hands with a weasel.

Re:The foundation owns only the trademark

[_merlin]

Linus made Linux in the first place. It's his baby. He should be able to take it wherever he wants, whether you or I like it. Whether Linux is in accord with the spirit of the GPL v2 or v3 is irrelevant - the fact is he likes the letter of GPL v2 (I think his assertion that he understands the spirit of GPL v2 better than it's authors is silly, though).

Personally, I disagree with a lot of things about Linux. And you know what I can do about it? Just not use Linux at home. Sure, I use Linux at work, because I develop software for it, because customers want to use it, just as I use Windows at work for developing Windows software for customers who want to use Windows. You can call me a sellout, but the reason I'm at work is to provide something that customers want, to make money to buy food, etc.

If you want an OS that fits your ideology, find like-minded people and build one. Isn't that what HURD is meant to be? Don't try to take over Linux. Since HURD is going nowhere, it would appear that not that many significant developers care about building an OS on an ideology.

Linux seems to get the balance right for a lot of people: open enough that you can modify it and feel in control, but not overly restricted so you can't build a workable business around it. It may be an uncomfortable fact for some, but Linux wouldn't be where it is now without the commercial backing it's got from IBM, Novell, etc. Building and maintaining something like an OS requires huge effort, and the only way to muster that in a capitalist society is with the prospect of building a profitable business on it.

Re:The foundation owns only the trademark

[TheRaven64]

Linus made Linux in the first place. It's his baby. He should be able to take it wherever he wants, whether you or I like it. The first place was a long time ago. The first release of Linux was about 10K lines of code; about half the amount of code that I have released so far this year as Free Software (not to Linux, so I have no personal stake in this). Since then, he hasn't exactly done nothing, but his contributions are dwarfed by the large number of other people who have contributed. He can do whatever he wants irrespective of what I want, but I don't think he should ignore the hundreds of other people who who have written the code that makes the kernel what it is today.

Re:The foundation owns only the trademark

[jkrise]

How exactly did MS swallow "the BSD"? Last time I checked, BSD projects and communities were as strong as ever.

How dd they swallow BSD? Simple:
1.First they drank the BSD licensed code, like Kerberos from MIT and the BSD TCP-IP stack.
2. As it descended down their oesophagus, they added proprietary extensions to it, and bundled it with their inferior monopoly Windows OS.
3. The corporate types were then fed with choice quotes and reviews, and Active (Craptive) Directory got deployed.
4. The market leading authentication mechanism is now incompatible with the original BSD Kerberos; thus it has been effectively swallowed.
Clear?

Re:The foundation owns only the trademark

[rucs_hack]

Lets clear one thing up right here. Microsoft was not only allowed, but very wise to use the bsd TCP/IP stack. Berkley were asked to produce the definitive version of the stack, so as to ensure that all vendors were on the same page, so far as the specification was concerned.

Microsoft changed some parts, as is their wont, but much of it remains unchanged. They may be buggers about a lot of things, but lets get this right, if they hadn't adopted BSDs TCP/IP code, windows would be even worse then it is now.

Taking things seriously

[JeremyGNJ]

It's nice to see the Linux Foundation taking things seriously.

Despite what the board-posting-fanboy-home-users say on slashdot, the legal ramifications of Linux are a serious concern to businesses adopting it. If they aren't nailed down and addressed, then it will continue to be the preferred OS of Mom's basement.

In the end I think that the outcome will be playing nicer with closed-source and allowing a certain amount of concession. The question is: Is the community mature enough to handle that?

Re:The foundation owns only the trademark

[mengel]

But they don't have support for nearly as much networking hardware as Windows does. In a GPL world, much of that support would have had to be contributed back. With a BSD license, Microsoft can have a whole herd of programmers extend the code, and keep all their extensions, and the improvements to the code don't go back to BSD.

No big deal, you say, that doesn't hurt the BSD code as it exists, sure. But now take 4 or 5 or 20 groups all doing this to the BSD code -- the codebase doesn't move much, even though lots of people are making individual improvements -- even worse, those 20 groups don't get to leverage off of each others improvements.

So while people can contribute changes to BSD code back to the code base (and many folks do), big players like Microsoft can mooch off of them and contribute nothing back; making their product always a little bit better than the BSD licensed one, which starves the BSD licencsed product of customers. And in an open source project, customers are also a developer pool.