For whatever reason, this is all I can think of right now.
Lisa: By your logic, this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh? How does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?
[pause] Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
In the above statements, if you could substitute the word "Linux" or "NetBSD" for every occurrence of Macintosh, and not sound like some sort of raving lunatic, I'd be surprised.
Uh... well... let's try.
"Sure [Linux] works great on [a popular configuration], but start throwing it on people custom machines and trying to run all kinds of crazy hardware setups and [Linux] isn't going to run so swell anymore."
Honestly this seems to describe my exact experience with Linux. There have been multiple times that I've attempted to install Linux on [X random piece of obscure hardware] and had to spend a pretty decent amount of time hunting down network drivers, compiling video drivers, hand-editing module files and generally just doing things that would be impossible for a non-programmer to even attempt.
Yeah, Linux has support for a disturbingly large range of hardware. That doesn't mean it has good support for even an acceptably large range of hardware. If we're supposed to expect that Mac OS X would be able to handle wide and varied hardware with the same level of functionality and ease of use as Linux does, this would seem to be the most extreme argument in favor of keeping OS X on Apple hardware possible. One word: XF86Config.
To my mind, if you have to compare narcotics that can potentially kill you to works of artistic entertainment, this is a sign you don't have much of a point to begin with.
Perhaps that would get the parents attention if there was a law saying 18+ games must be purchased by 18+ year olds.
I see no good reason why I, a consenting adult, should have to be subject to legal infrastructure standing between me and a video game because a bunch of uptight parents can't be bothered to raise their children themselves.
Most movie theaters enforce R ratings by not selling tickets to 14 year olds.
Not by law. Not in America. They enforce this by a private industry oversight group, much like the one which creates and enforces game ratings.
And this, among other reasons, is why scientists talk about "global climate change" and not "global temperature change". It may be helpful to find out what those words mean.
In the meantime, trying to blow off a 0.5 degree and increasing increase in global average yearly temperatures as meaningless betrays a massive lack of knowledge about how the atmosphere works. Weather systems are complex, hair-trigger systems, and even truly tiny variations in long-term temperatures can have surprising and drastic effects. As a comparison, the localized El Nino phenomenon is at its lower end 0.5 degrees of temperature variance, but that doesn't stop it from having many, varied and large-scale effects.
Wait, I appear to have made an error. The GPL exemption I cite covers open source software on propreitary systems whereas the person I was responding to was trying to talk about propreitary software on open source operating systems, which would seem to be a different situation. Please ignore that bit of my post.
The article only says that one Sony artist is publishing his work against Sony's will on the iTMS, and only one. Given the existence of multiple wierd exceptions to normal contract rules in American popular music alone, it does not seem at all unrealistic to suppose that there is at least one Japanese popular musician who has a contract wherein he retains some degree of copyright control or contract nonexclusivity.
I am flatly flabbergasted at the number of people in these article comments who are expressing the observation that if you want to sell your music commercially you must give up your "rights"/"free speech"/whatever, and don't seem to see anything wrong with this situation.
Just because this is the system the Good Lord Capitalism has handed down to us doesn't mean that it is a good system. These people didn't sign these contracts by choice, they signed it because cartels are by and large holding the world's music industries hostage and these cartels use their influence to force people to choose between giving up their artistic work to others and not being able to make artistic work at all. Not much of a choice at all, that.
If we lived in an actually free market artists (or artists less rich than David Bowie anyway) would have choices, they'd be able to negotiate terms or obtain a distribution contract acceptable to them, rather than dictated by a record label. We don't. We live in a market dictated by the wielders of monopoly power.
And don't try to claim they could go to independent record labels. I listen to practically nothing but independent music, I've done work in/with self-published music, and I know some independently-signed musicians. Independent music is a ghetto. It is something you do because you love the art and you love what you are doing. It is not really something you can turn into a career.
It looks like Apple is going to sell a lot of iPods to Japanese consumers.
This may well be the exact thing upsetting Sony so much in the first place. Remember, Sony doesn't want Japanese consumers to buy iPods. Sony wants Japanese consumers to buy PSPs. (Though Japanese consumers don't seem especially interested in buying PSPs)...
But you sold away that right in exchange from a large advance from Sony
Are you sure? That would depend on the details of their contract and the details of Japanese contract law, wouldn't it? Depending on those details they may well have sold away the right to Sony to distribute their work on CD while retaining some sort of right to independently negotiate sales through other entities on new mediums.
We don't have copies of their contracts, so we don't know. But something of this sort is clearly the case with Mr. Motoharu Sano who said the thing you quote; otherwise Apple certainly would not have allowed his music onto their store in the first place, as doing so would have been illegal.
You can't have it both ways. You can have your freedom or you can take the corporate dollar.
This seems to be the case right now, but only in a practical or logistics sense. Aside from purely practical matters, there seems to be no good reason why this is the case, and so there is no good reason to shrug things off and accept the way things are. Not all evils are necessary.
I am not talking about programs. I am talking about kernel modules. Kernel modules link against the kernel directly, yet so long as they use a specific interface are allowed to consider themselves free from GPL obligations.
* (REG) By default, symbols are exported using EXPORT_SYMBOL, so they can be used by loadable modules. During the 2.4 series, a new export directive EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL was added. This is almost the same thing, except that the symbol can only be accessed by modules which have a GPL compatible licence (note that this includes dual-licenced BSD/GPL code). This new directive was added for these reasons:
o To clarify the ambiguous legal ground on which non-GPL (particularly proprietary) modules lie. A strict reading of the GPL prohibits loading proprietary modules into the kernel. While Linus has consistently stated that proprietary modules are allowed (i.e. he has granted an explicit exemption), it is not clear that he is able to speak for all developers who have contributed to the Linux kernel. While many think Linus' edict means that all contributed code falls under this exemption granted by Linus, not everyone agrees that this is a legally sound argument. The new EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL directive makes the licence conditions explicit, and thus removes the legal ambiguity.
o To allow choice for developers who wish, for their own reasons, to contribute code which cannot be used by proprietary modules. Just as a developer has the right to distribute code under a proprietary licence, so too may a developer distribute code under an anti-proprietary licence (i.e. strict GPL).
Note that Linus has stated that existing symbols will not be switched to GPL-only. Developers of proprietary modules for Linux need not fear. Furthermore, it is quite unlikely that Linus will look favourably upon the introduction of new core driver APIs which are restricted to GPL-only modules. This would not be in the best interests of Linux. Linus has forwarded me a message he sent to someone else to clarify his views.
It has an opinion from Linus on what constitutes a derivative work and not (f.ex. that userland programs are not), but it is nothing more than an opinion.
This is not an opinion, nor is it Linus's. It is an explicit exemption in the GPL itself:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
The problem with defining an interface is that the copyright holders (read: all of them) must approve every change to the interface.
Then make sure you do not accept code from other copyright holders unless they agree to let you determine the interface contents yourself. Looking above it appears Linus did not exactly do this, however others do not have to make this mistake.
It is not as simple as that, as your program with this additional permission cannot incorporate code of other programs released under the "pure" GPL. So your code can be used under "pure" GPL code (if you make this additional permission an option), but not the other way around (you cannot use "pure" GPL code and add this permission to the combined program).
This is not going to change. "Pure" GPL is what the people who released the "other programs released under the pure GPL" want. If the person who had released the "pure" GPL code you want to incorporate had been okay with you taking it and linking it against propreitary code, they would have used the LGPL to begin with. That is what it is there for.
The reason you can't take other GPL code contributors and link it into propreitary code isn't because of the GPL. It's because the other code contributors didn't want you to.
If there's GPL and LGPL code mixed in a program, then the program as a whole is licensed under the GPL.
However, the LGPLed parts are still just as LGPLed as they were before. The LGPL parts may then be detached and used in anything else you like. An example of this in action would be the KDE web browser Konqueror. Konqueror is under the GPL. However, portions of it (specifically the KHTML web rendering component) are licensed under the LGPL. You can't take Konqueror (or anything built using any of the GPL-licensed files in Konqueror) and distribute it without obeying the GPL. However, you can take KHTML-- which is an extremely useful piece of software-- build a new web browser around it, and resell it completely free of GPL obligations. Several commercial groups, such as Apple Computer, have done exactly this.
This obviously only works under some circumstances (for example, when the LGPLed component is something which can be detached and still be useful), but under some circumstances this is exactly what you want. I considered it worthy of mention because the toplevel post seemed to me to be very vague about exactly what it was he wanted.
All you have to do is distribute your program under the GPL, and provide a file saying "you are granted the rights to redistribute under the GPL, however you also are granted the right to link against this program and redistribute freely so long as you do so only via the interfaces declared in public_interface.h."
It is as simple as that. The Linux Kernel, as it happens, does almost exactly this.
Another option is that you could put some parts of your program (the "private" parts) under the GPL and other parts (the "public" parts) under the LGPL. I have seen programs that did exactly this.
The GPL does not restrict rights. It only grants them. As the copyright holder, you are of course free to grant as many other rights as you want in addition to the GPL rights. Of course, you can't speak for any other copyright holders that may have provided material in the program...
Meanwhile to counterpart Blu-Ray's "interesting" copy control features, at least as the standard stands, HD-DVD discs MUST CONTAIN DRM in order to be played in an HD-DVD player AT ALL. This is not like DVD, where CSS was an option which disc creators could choose to follow or not follow and you could just freely stick into a DVD player a DVD-R you burned. An HD-DVD drive is not allowed, by the current compliance rules, to play ANY HD-DVD disc which doesn't have a digital watermark granted directly by the central HD-DVD authority. Interestingly these watermarks include a "banned" list-- HD-DVDs keep an internal list of watermarks that have been "revoked", and every new HD-DVD printed will contain an up-to-date copy of that "revoked" list which the HD-DVD player must update every time you put in an HD-DVD. If the HD-DVD player sees a disc whose watermark has been placed on the "banned" list, it refuses to play it.
They allow EULAs on shrink-wrapped software and shrink-wrapped DVDs already, what makes books any different?
A lot of people, including me, think they shouldn't allow EULAs on shrink-wrapped software and shrink-wrapped DVDs.
This is where this "slippery slope" thing that people are always complaining about comes from in the first place. "You let me get away with it before, so you should let me get away with it in future" becomes "you let me get away with it before, therefore you should let me get away with it in this totally other circumstance".
2. Under *NO* possible scenario do they "have" to open-source their kernel. This is FUD straight from Bill Gates.
Actually, they have to open-source their kernel under one possible scenario:
If they link against linux code from their kernel, and they wish to continue distributing this kernel after this comes to light.
SCO kind of needs to keep distributing their kernel. They still sell the thing as their core business. Or they claim they do, anyway, whether that's actually what they do is another matter.
Now, they can of course just cut out all the GPLed code and keep distributing their kernel with the GPL-linked parts missing, but if the GPLed code exists it appears it's in the LKP, which is a fairly major feature that SCO has been advertising heavily as, well, almost SCO UNIX's only notable feature of late. It is quite likely many of SCO's customers are now depending on this feature. Dropping it now would be a painful decision even if their customers (both of them that remain, anyway) would let them do it at all.
Having to make a choice between GPLing their kernel and dropping the LKP, if it comes to that-- and depending on exactly what and where whatever Linux, that-- is not really much of a choice. But, of course, if that comes to pass it will be only because SCO purposefully decided to become bootleggers on a huge scale, so don't feel sympathy for them.
Well, it's not necessarily that straightforward. If you gave a random Linux distribution CD to a friend of yours, but unbeknownst to you there was a GPL-licensed piece of software on there that incorporated significant chunks of your non-GPL code without your permission... should that mean that you've officially approved your intellectual property to be licensed under the GPL?
Well, I would say that's a very different situation-- and I've seen analyses of this very issue which claim that under such a case no, you haven't licensed anything, due to something I do not understand called "the doctrine of mutual mistake".
However, that's if the presence of the GPL code was "unbeknowst to you". What I am getting at is that the email quoted in the toplevel post could potentially constitute proof that the GPL-distribution-of-hypthetically-derived code actions happened knowingly. That would change the situation significantly. This was the entire point I was trying to make.
The childish insults are distracting from an important point here. When did that email take place? Because if the linux kernel code on SCO's website continued to be present past that point, that would make it clear that SCO's distribution of the linux kernel under the GPL terms could not possibly be said to be anything but conscious and intentional-- because there is documentation they knew about this internally.
The observation has been made many times that if SCO owns anything at all in Linux (which they don't, but they claim they do), the ownership doesn't count for anything since they've granted everybody an irrevocable, transferrable license to use that owned material by their distribution of tarballs containing all of Linux plus that little file saying "we grant you a license to use this under the terms of the GPL". If this email proves SCO was fully aware of what they were doing by distributing this tarball and just didn't care, that would seem to make that argument rock-solid.
Slashdot Mirror
In the above statements, if you could substitute the word "Linux" or "NetBSD" for every occurrence of Macintosh, and not sound like some sort of raving lunatic, I'd be surprised.
Uh... well... let's try.
"Sure [Linux] works great on [a popular configuration], but start throwing it on people custom machines and trying to run all kinds of crazy hardware setups and [Linux] isn't going to run so swell anymore."
Honestly this seems to describe my exact experience with Linux. There have been multiple times that I've attempted to install Linux on [X random piece of obscure hardware] and had to spend a pretty decent amount of time hunting down network drivers, compiling video drivers, hand-editing module files and generally just doing things that would be impossible for a non-programmer to even attempt.
Yeah, Linux has support for a disturbingly large range of hardware. That doesn't mean it has good support for even an acceptably large range of hardware. If we're supposed to expect that Mac OS X would be able to handle wide and varied hardware with the same level of functionality and ease of use as Linux does, this would seem to be the most extreme argument in favor of keeping OS X on Apple hardware possible. One word: XF86Config.
To my mind, if you have to compare narcotics that can potentially kill you to works of artistic entertainment, this is a sign you don't have much of a point to begin with.
Perhaps that would get the parents attention if there was a law saying 18+ games must be purchased by 18+ year olds.
I see no good reason why I, a consenting adult, should have to be subject to legal infrastructure standing between me and a video game because a bunch of uptight parents can't be bothered to raise their children themselves.
Most movie theaters enforce R ratings by not selling tickets to 14 year olds.
Not by law. Not in America. They enforce this by a private industry oversight group, much like the one which creates and enforces game ratings.
When you're getting advice in social graces from MIT... you know something's wrong
BA-DUM CHING
And this, among other reasons, is why scientists talk about "global climate change" and not "global temperature change". It may be helpful to find out what those words mean.
In the meantime, trying to blow off a 0.5 degree and increasing increase in global average yearly temperatures as meaningless betrays a massive lack of knowledge about how the atmosphere works. Weather systems are complex, hair-trigger systems, and even truly tiny variations in long-term temperatures can have surprising and drastic effects. As a comparison, the localized El Nino phenomenon is at its lower end 0.5 degrees of temperature variance, but that doesn't stop it from having many, varied and large-scale effects.
Once again, other countries are moving ahead, acquiring tomorrow's technology.
Foreign countries like California?
I mean now that you mention it I guess it is, but...
Unfortunately, Ken Kutagari does not have the clarity of thought you appear to.
Or possibly this story about tourists being offered a chance to fly around the moon for 100 million.
Slashdot's run a story about that already. In fact, I'm pretty sure they've run multiple dupes of a story about that already.
Wait, I appear to have made an error. The GPL exemption I cite covers open source software on propreitary systems whereas the person I was responding to was trying to talk about propreitary software on open source operating systems, which would seem to be a different situation. Please ignore that bit of my post.
Why would Sony give money to a recording artist if not for the rights to the recordings?
Um, to sell them?
Generally yes, signing a record label means giving up recording rights. However the record label doesn't always win and it isn't like exceptions to the rule are impossible. Even in popular music in the U.S. you can find examples of artists who were able to wrangle distribution contracts rather than recording artist contracts, or contracts which are nonexclusive in the sense of allowing the artist to release for competing record labels, or which only cover existing publishing mediums but grant the band the right to re-negotiate on future mediums (I am pretty sure Boston pulled this off with compact discs?).
The article only says that one Sony artist is publishing his work against Sony's will on the iTMS, and only one. Given the existence of multiple wierd exceptions to normal contract rules in American popular music alone, it does not seem at all unrealistic to suppose that there is at least one Japanese popular musician who has a contract wherein he retains some degree of copyright control or contract nonexclusivity.
I am flatly flabbergasted at the number of people in these article comments who are expressing the observation that if you want to sell your music commercially you must give up your "rights"/"free speech"/whatever, and don't seem to see anything wrong with this situation.
Just because this is the system the Good Lord Capitalism has handed down to us doesn't mean that it is a good system. These people didn't sign these contracts by choice, they signed it because cartels are by and large holding the world's music industries hostage and these cartels use their influence to force people to choose between giving up their artistic work to others and not being able to make artistic work at all. Not much of a choice at all, that.
If we lived in an actually free market artists (or artists less rich than David Bowie anyway) would have choices, they'd be able to negotiate terms or obtain a distribution contract acceptable to them, rather than dictated by a record label. We don't. We live in a market dictated by the wielders of monopoly power.
And don't try to claim they could go to independent record labels. I listen to practically nothing but independent music, I've done work in/with self-published music, and I know some independently-signed musicians. Independent music is a ghetto. It is something you do because you love the art and you love what you are doing. It is not really something you can turn into a career.
It looks like Apple is going to sell a lot of iPods to Japanese consumers.
This may well be the exact thing upsetting Sony so much in the first place. Remember, Sony doesn't want Japanese consumers to buy iPods. Sony wants Japanese consumers to buy PSPs. (Though Japanese consumers don't seem especially interested in buying PSPs)...
But you sold away that right in exchange from a large advance from Sony
Are you sure? That would depend on the details of their contract and the details of Japanese contract law, wouldn't it? Depending on those details they may well have sold away the right to Sony to distribute their work on CD while retaining some sort of right to independently negotiate sales through other entities on new mediums.
We don't have copies of their contracts, so we don't know. But something of this sort is clearly the case with Mr. Motoharu Sano who said the thing you quote; otherwise Apple certainly would not have allowed his music onto their store in the first place, as doing so would have been illegal.
You can't have it both ways. You can have your freedom or you can take the corporate dollar.
This seems to be the case right now, but only in a practical or logistics sense. Aside from purely practical matters, there seems to be no good reason why this is the case, and so there is no good reason to shrug things off and accept the way things are. Not all evils are necessary.
The Linux Kernel mailing list FAQ:
Here is a message from Linus explaining things further on the subject.
It has an opinion from Linus on what constitutes a derivative work and not (f.ex. that userland programs are not), but it is nothing more than an opinion.
This is not an opinion, nor is it Linus's. It is an explicit exemption in the GPL itself: The problem with defining an interface is that the copyright holders (read: all of them) must approve every change to the interface.
Then make sure you do not accept code from other copyright holders unless they agree to let you determine the interface contents yourself. Looking above it appears Linus did not exactly do this, however others do not have to make this mistake.
It is not as simple as that, as your program with this additional permission cannot incorporate code of other programs released under the "pure" GPL. So your code can be used under "pure" GPL code (if you make this additional permission an option), but not the other way around (you cannot use "pure" GPL code and add this permission to the combined program).
This is not going to change. "Pure" GPL is what the people who released the "other programs released under the pure GPL" want. If the person who had released the "pure" GPL code you want to incorporate had been okay with you taking it and linking it against propreitary code, they would have used the LGPL to begin with. That is what it is there for.
The reason you can't take other GPL code contributors and link it into propreitary code isn't because of the GPL. It's because the other code contributors didn't want you to.
Sure you can.
If there's GPL and LGPL code mixed in a program, then the program as a whole is licensed under the GPL.
However, the LGPLed parts are still just as LGPLed as they were before. The LGPL parts may then be detached and used in anything else you like. An example of this in action would be the KDE web browser Konqueror. Konqueror is under the GPL. However, portions of it (specifically the KHTML web rendering component) are licensed under the LGPL. You can't take Konqueror (or anything built using any of the GPL-licensed files in Konqueror) and distribute it without obeying the GPL. However, you can take KHTML-- which is an extremely useful piece of software-- build a new web browser around it, and resell it completely free of GPL obligations. Several commercial groups, such as Apple Computer, have done exactly this.
This obviously only works under some circumstances (for example, when the LGPLed component is something which can be detached and still be useful), but under some circumstances this is exactly what you want. I considered it worthy of mention because the toplevel post seemed to me to be very vague about exactly what it was he wanted.
All you have to do is distribute your program under the GPL, and provide a file saying "you are granted the rights to redistribute under the GPL, however you also are granted the right to link against this program and redistribute freely so long as you do so only via the interfaces declared in public_interface.h."
It is as simple as that. The Linux Kernel, as it happens, does almost exactly this.
Another option is that you could put some parts of your program (the "private" parts) under the GPL and other parts (the "public" parts) under the LGPL. I have seen programs that did exactly this.
The GPL does not restrict rights. It only grants them. As the copyright holder, you are of course free to grant as many other rights as you want in addition to the GPL rights. Of course, you can't speak for any other copyright holders that may have provided material in the program...
Finally, will Sony follow a similar strategy to eke additional revenues out of its PlayStation 3?
:/
God, I hope not.
Because if there's one thing the PS3 is going to need badly, it's going to be a healthy market for third party controllers...
The HD-DVD peoples published the specs on their DRM scheme months and months ago.
Meanwhile to counterpart Blu-Ray's "interesting" copy control features, at least as the standard stands, HD-DVD discs MUST CONTAIN DRM in order to be played in an HD-DVD player AT ALL. This is not like DVD, where CSS was an option which disc creators could choose to follow or not follow and you could just freely stick into a DVD player a DVD-R you burned. An HD-DVD drive is not allowed, by the current compliance rules, to play ANY HD-DVD disc which doesn't have a digital watermark granted directly by the central HD-DVD authority. Interestingly these watermarks include a "banned" list-- HD-DVDs keep an internal list of watermarks that have been "revoked", and every new HD-DVD printed will contain an up-to-date copy of that "revoked" list which the HD-DVD player must update every time you put in an HD-DVD. If the HD-DVD player sees a disc whose watermark has been placed on the "banned" list, it refuses to play it.
They allow EULAs on shrink-wrapped software and shrink-wrapped DVDs already, what makes books any different?
A lot of people, including me, think they shouldn't allow EULAs on shrink-wrapped software and shrink-wrapped DVDs.
This is where this "slippery slope" thing that people are always complaining about comes from in the first place. "You let me get away with it before, so you should let me get away with it in future" becomes "you let me get away with it before, therefore you should let me get away with it in this totally other circumstance".
2. Under *NO* possible scenario do they "have" to open-source their kernel. This is FUD straight from Bill Gates.
Actually, they have to open-source their kernel under one possible scenario:
If they link against linux code from their kernel, and they wish to continue distributing this kernel after this comes to light.
SCO kind of needs to keep distributing their kernel. They still sell the thing as their core business. Or they claim they do, anyway, whether that's actually what they do is another matter.
Now, they can of course just cut out all the GPLed code and keep distributing their kernel with the GPL-linked parts missing, but if the GPLed code exists it appears it's in the LKP, which is a fairly major feature that SCO has been advertising heavily as, well, almost SCO UNIX's only notable feature of late. It is quite likely many of SCO's customers are now depending on this feature. Dropping it now would be a painful decision even if their customers (both of them that remain, anyway) would let them do it at all.
Having to make a choice between GPLing their kernel and dropping the LKP, if it comes to that-- and depending on exactly what and where whatever Linux, that-- is not really much of a choice. But, of course, if that comes to pass it will be only because SCO purposefully decided to become bootleggers on a huge scale, so don't feel sympathy for them.
Well, it's not necessarily that straightforward. If you gave a random Linux distribution CD to a friend of yours, but unbeknownst to you there was a GPL-licensed piece of software on there that incorporated significant chunks of your non-GPL code without your permission... should that mean that you've officially approved your intellectual property to be licensed under the GPL?
Well, I would say that's a very different situation-- and I've seen analyses of this very issue which claim that under such a case no, you haven't licensed anything, due to something I do not understand called "the doctrine of mutual mistake".
However, that's if the presence of the GPL code was "unbeknowst to you". What I am getting at is that the email quoted in the toplevel post could potentially constitute proof that the GPL-distribution-of-hypthetically-derived code actions happened knowingly. That would change the situation significantly. This was the entire point I was trying to make.
The childish insults are distracting from an important point here. When did that email take place? Because if the linux kernel code on SCO's website continued to be present past that point, that would make it clear that SCO's distribution of the linux kernel under the GPL terms could not possibly be said to be anything but conscious and intentional-- because there is documentation they knew about this internally.
The observation has been made many times that if SCO owns anything at all in Linux (which they don't, but they claim they do), the ownership doesn't count for anything since they've granted everybody an irrevocable, transferrable license to use that owned material by their distribution of tarballs containing all of Linux plus that little file saying "we grant you a license to use this under the terms of the GPL". If this email proves SCO was fully aware of what they were doing by distributing this tarball and just didn't care, that would seem to make that argument rock-solid.
Good call. I didn't think of that.