All of the things you describe are possible, but are they really likely? Red Hat's S-1 makes it abundantly clear that their continued success as a business depends on the goodwill and active assistance of people they don't even employ.
The Linux community is very, very effective at creating a public reactions crisis on the Internet for any company, and a company that has just gone public and hasn't established much of a track record is extremely vulnerable to any bad news. There will be thousands of day traders out there who won't necessarily react even-handedly to any bad news, and a lot of them use altavista, excite, or hotbot as their primary research tools.
If an event like Rasterman's resignation happened after Redhat was publicly traded, his letter and the resulting entertaining threads on Slashdot probably would have slammed their stock price.
I'm sure we'll get to see working examples of this in the near future. Stay tuned.
My company uses Linux, and we've gone and played lawyer-ball every six months or so and made sure we were in compliance with the GPL.
One of the interesting things that has came out of this is that I have come to doubt the legal enforcability of the GPL. What, in practice, will keep companies in compliance with the GPL is negative publicity.
The reason for this is that the intent of copyright law is to protect the copyright holder. This means that licensing agreements that limit the copyright holder's liability or guarantee the copyright holder's right to compensation are okay. Restrictions on usage are much more problematic. As an example, you get into trouble with anti-trust laws if you force one group of customers to pay for the license, and another group can get it for free. Sometimes you can get into trouble if you charge different prices. Similarly, restrictions on usage of derived works (the place where I think the GPL gets into deep trouble) are considered by lawyers to be "problematic", meaning that they will be decided in court on a case-by-case basis. As there has not yet been a case involving open source software, we all ought to be a little spooked.
Assume that someone was a total jerk, took a Red Hat Linux distribution, modified it extensively, and distributed it without any credit whatsoever to the Linux world and without complying with the terms and conditions of the GPL. Who can sue? In theory, the copyright holders can. The first problem is that there are likely to be a whole bunch of them. The second problem is that since they are giving the software away for free, there is no way to collect damages and therefore enforce a monetary award. If a copyright is unregistered, damages in such an action are limited to the monetary losses the copyright holder suffered. If the copyright is registered, the copyright holder is entitled to triple damages. Unfortunately, thrice nothing is still nothing.
The only legal avenue possible is to sue to force the party in question to release the source code. Then you'll quickly get down to what is a derived work. That will be decided by a roomful of lawyers with limited technical training. It is hard to see how that will end happily.
All I know is what I see. My company would kill for four or five more strong Linux people.
This is also a blatant plug, and I hope nobody has a problem with that. Anyway, if you wouldn't mind a job in Seattle with stock options, hard work, competitive pay, and the ability to fiddle around with Linux, contact us at:
resumes@watchguard.com
--or, e-mail me at:
david.bonn@watchguard.com
If you've written network device drivers, programs that use lots of networking functions, boot loaders, or in general made significant modifications to a Linux kernel to make your life cooler I'd love to hear from you.
David Bonn CTO WatchGuard Technologies, Inc
P.S. If you don't want to work for us, or don't want to live in Seattle, I'm interested in (and better still, have a budget for) funding Linux software projects. So if you're working on something impossibly cool and need gear or grub or a place to crash, send me an e-mail.
So, what the story is here is that someone has a potentially cool idea, which has no actual implementation or other proof-of-concept.
If DSC was stupid enough to offer US $2,000,000 sight unseen for ANYTHING, and was willing to go to court over this, they are so stupid this problem will correct itself.
Hopefully I'll be able to get a job with them before they go out of business. I sure hope that $2,000,000 check will be good.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The Linux community is very, very effective at creating a public reactions crisis on the Internet for any company, and a company that has just gone public and hasn't established much of a track record is extremely vulnerable to any bad news. There will be thousands of day traders out there who won't necessarily react even-handedly to any bad news, and a lot of them use altavista, excite, or hotbot as their primary research tools.
If an event like Rasterman's resignation happened after Redhat was publicly traded, his letter and the resulting entertaining threads on Slashdot probably would have slammed their stock price.
I'm sure we'll get to see working examples of this in the near future. Stay tuned.
David Bonn, CTO, Watchguard Technologies
-------
"I'll shoot beer cans, but only in self-defense" -- Edward Abbey
One of the interesting things that has came out of this is that I have come to doubt the legal enforcability of the GPL. What, in practice, will keep companies in compliance with the GPL is negative publicity.
The reason for this is that the intent of copyright law is to protect the copyright holder. This means that licensing agreements that limit the copyright holder's liability or guarantee the copyright holder's right to compensation are okay. Restrictions on usage are much more problematic. As an example, you get into trouble with anti-trust laws if you force one group of customers to pay for the license, and another group can get it for free. Sometimes you can get into trouble if you charge different prices. Similarly, restrictions on usage of derived works (the place where I think the GPL gets into deep trouble) are considered by lawyers to be "problematic", meaning that they will be decided in court on a case-by-case basis. As there has not yet been a case involving open source software, we all ought to be a little spooked.
Assume that someone was a total jerk, took a Red Hat Linux distribution, modified it extensively, and distributed it without any credit whatsoever to the Linux world and without complying with the terms and conditions of the GPL. Who can sue? In theory, the copyright holders can. The first problem is that there are likely to be a whole bunch of them. The second problem is that since they are giving the software away for free, there is no way to collect damages and therefore enforce a monetary award. If a copyright is unregistered, damages in such an action are limited to the monetary losses the copyright holder suffered. If the copyright is registered, the copyright holder is entitled to triple damages. Unfortunately, thrice nothing is still nothing.
The only legal avenue possible is to sue to force the party in question to release the source code. Then you'll quickly get down to what is a derived work. That will be decided by a roomful of lawyers with limited technical training. It is hard to see how that will end happily.
This is also a blatant plug, and I hope nobody has a problem with that. Anyway, if you wouldn't mind a job in Seattle with stock options, hard work, competitive pay, and the ability to fiddle around with Linux, contact us at:
resumes@watchguard.com
--or, e-mail me at:
david.bonn@watchguard.com
If you've written network device drivers, programs that use lots of networking functions, boot loaders, or in general made significant modifications to a Linux kernel to make your life cooler I'd love to hear from you.
David Bonn
CTO
WatchGuard Technologies, Inc
P.S. If you don't want to work for us, or don't want to live in Seattle, I'm interested in (and better still, have a budget for) funding Linux software projects. So if you're working on something impossibly cool and need gear or grub or a place to crash, send me an e-mail.
If DSC was stupid enough to offer US $2,000,000 sight unseen for ANYTHING, and was willing to go to court over this, they are so stupid this problem will correct itself.
Hopefully I'll be able to get a job with them before they go out of business. I sure hope that $2,000,000 check will be good. :)