"IMHO, this is actually a reasonable legal document, where there may be an actual dispute over the idea of a derivative work."
There isn't any meaningful dispute. The agreements with AT&T covering both AIX and Dynix code use "derivative work" in the same way it is understood in all copyright law. There is nothing in the agreement that suggests that code which contains no copyrightable elements of SysV is a derivative work. The famous clause about treating derivative works the same as the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is just a statement of normal copyright protection.
Although she hasn't said so, this is the way the judge sees it. That is why she ruled in December that SCOG gets no discovery from IBM until they make their claims with specificity. They said they can't do this until they get the AIX development codebase from IBM, and the judge ignored them.
"It wouldn't take that much extra effort to have people sign up to post mirrors of sites or to post a Google cache, etc."
You can't just take anything you feel like and put it on your own web site as a mirror. Unless the material is available under a license like the Creative Commons License or the GPL, it would be a copyright violation to redistribute something from someone else's web page. This issue has been battered around in the past.
Do you look at the site's robot.txt to see if they block archiving by sites like google? If they do, it is a good guess they don't want anyone mirroring their content. But copyright protection is not opt-in; the material is protected by copyright law no matter what the robots.txt says.
There is no obvious solution outside of some rewrite of copyright law for the web. Maybe we could invent and publicize a Slashdot License. Get everyone to add a comment to their pages saying, "If a link to this page appears on slashdot, I give anyone permission to mirror the content unmodified for 48 hours."
"The real point of my previous post is that I recognize that there is a profound amount of ignorance out there about the GPL, and some of these ignorant people have loud voices and deep wallets. I expressed concern that this situation may only further fuel their misconceptions, not objectively give credibility to them, and that if they raise enough of a ruckus about it, other companies which might have otherwise participated in GPL projects might be dissuaded from it even before they have a chance to learn the truth."
This is true. But I think what you are saying can be reduced to "wealthy individuals and large corporations don't like following the law, and they will use their influence to try to get what they want regardless." If we let companies violate the copyrights on GPLed code so that they won't attack the GPL, there is no point in having the GPL at all.
Education is our best weapon. Anyone who reads Groklaw will learn that the GPL is easy to understand, easy to follow, does not pose a danger to them, and the free software community is not interested in appropriating proprietary code. (There are a small number of tricky cases in the GPL, but they are easy to avoid.)
"Perhaps if we were willing to employ a "scorched earth" policy (don't leave anything living) drones could be with out human controlers, but that is not political feasable (and a big step past any reasonable person's morals to boot)."
The US has certainly killed innocent civilians in the last three years because they were at a location where some public-enemy-of-the-day was thought to have been or because they were around someone who looked like a public-enemy-of-the-day. The Israelis have killed a lot of Palestinians who were not suicide bombers (the suicide bombers are by definition already dead). Morality aside, killing civilians appears to be quite politically feasible.
"IMO, of course, a company inadvertently putting its own proprietary code into a GPL'd work is pretty much the same as if a company had inadvertently divulged its own trade secrets, which in every case is the company's own damn fault for being careless."
Don't spread FUD about "viral"-ness of the GPL.
Imagine a janitor somewhere takes a bunch of secret documents and sets them out on the curb as trash, and someone else finds them and reads them. If there were any trade secrets in there, they are not trade secrets any longer.
The next night, the same janitor sits down at a terminal, takes the company's proprietary code, slaps the GPL on the front of it, and puts it on a public web site. Is this code now GPLed? No. The janitor had no authority to license the code, so he cannot release it under the GPL.
Programmers generally don't have the authority to relicense the code they are working on, and, if they do not, they can never cause proprietary code to become GPLed. They can violate copyright, though.
"While Groklaw's research in this matter is comendable, the comparatively recent allegation of purloined header files was never central to the dispute."
I think you are missing something here. SCO's case against IBM is based on use of RCU, JFS, and so on in violation of a contract. (It almost certainly isn't, but that is not the point here.) This matter is between SCO and IBM.
SCO is claiming that the header files are copyrighted by them. This (in theory) involves anyone who makes a copy of the Linux kernel. If SCO tells some random company not to use Linux because of the RCU dispute, they can answer that that issue is between SCO and IBM. But if SCO tells a company to stop installing copies of Linux because doing so violates SCO's copyrights, then the company has to have someone with enough wits to know that SCO is not correct.
SCO has in effect threatened to sue Linux users. Saying "You need to buy a license from us" implicitly includes "or we will take you to court." The issue of the header files is central to these potential suits against users.
"I love Sci-fi as much as anyone, but I don't believe that we will hand over fire control any time in our lifetimes"
I am not as sure of this as I would like to be.
Isn't it true that opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden were missed because of the delay in interpreting the images and getting permission to fire? (I am not sure of this...) First, imagine putting face-recognition software in the surveillance drones. No reason not to. Then imagine that the drones pick out public-enemy-of-the-day and send a blip back to their controllers, but Mr. Baddy is gone before the humans can react, get permission to fire, and so on. Someone will make the point that Mr. Baddy would be gone of the drone had been allowed to fire based on the face recognition routines, and a large part of the public will be in favor of it.
I don't think this is all that likely, but I would not be surprised the slightest if it did happen.
"Planes, tanks, nuclear weapons, and a whole raft of other innovations were supposed to make the common infantryman obsolete. Guess what, the grunt is still around."
Excellent point. Maybe what is being missed is that the nature of conflicts will change. Has the existence of nuclear weapons made war obsolete? No. But we have not had all-out war between two countries with nuclear weapons. If the US has a fleet of warrior robots, then conflict will only be provoked in situations where the robots do not confer much advantage. (What does a robot do in a swampy jungle? Or is the plan to only attack countries in the Middle East and Asia that have big open deserts to drive around in?)
The human soldier is more versatile than any robot can ever be. I can put my soldiers somewhere your robots cannot reach, but I cannot put them out of reach of your soldiers. The main effect of the robots may be to prevent any war in which they would be valuable.
"A single service mission to Hubble costs a cubic buttload of cash, cash that might be better reserved for Hubble's successor. [snip] How would you feel if seven astronauts were killed trying to extend Hubbles life a few years"
Your argument would make more sense if the money not spent on Hubble was going to be spent on the next generation space telescope (ST:tNG?), but it isn't. It would also make more sense if all manned spaceflight was being stopped because of safety considerations, but it isn't.
Compare the scientific value of the HST to that of the space station (or another moon shot or manned mission to Mars). One flight to the Hubble is a lot safer and cheaper than dozens of flights to the space station, and many would say it would produce more scientific value.
Can we trust them to be fair and unbiased in their "research"?
When a mistake is made in an article, is it analyzed and corrected? (Yes.)
Are the sources for background facts reliable? (Yes. Most of it comes from court documents and SEC filings, and an occasional question posed to directly to Linus or another expert.)
If anyone, even one of SCOG's lawyers, can come up with a single fact supporting their allegations or a consistent legal argument for their highly original interpretation of copyright law, Groklaw would happily publish it. The truth is that the only way to discuss the current and potential lawsuits is either 1) live in a fantasy world where the law and the facts have no effect or 2) talk badly about SCO. There is no third choice.
What can be done is to try to always tie arguments and opinions to the proveable facts as closely as possible, and this is what the Groklaw stories do.
>> One of the consequences is that if you select text and close that program then that data is gone!
> This is not true.
I just tried this. Open 2 xterms. Type ls in one, highlight a filename, close the xterm. Middle click in the other xterm, and the text appears. So it is not always true that the data is gone. (Probably some of the time.)
I would add that it has never occurred to me in using X for 15 years to highlight text, close the app, and try to paste the text. Why do that when you have a multitasking OS and a window manager?
"This means that according to their claim, Linux in fact does not have to be the same as System V, it only has to be derived from it for them to have ownership of (part of) the Linux source code."
You have to be careful to interpret the law using the legal definition of derived work, not a vernacular definition.
A derived work contains material that is covered by copyright taken from another work.
Imagine I take some numbers from a table in your book to make a graph to put in my book. In a colloquial sense you might say my work is derived from yours, but it is not a derived work in the legal sense, because all I took was information, which is not protected under copyright law.
To justify a claim that Linux is a derived work, SCO would need to identify specific elements copied and show that these elements are protected by copyright law. In theory, non-literal elements in the design could be protected, but given the great variety of Unix-y operating systems that exist and the complicated history of their dissemination, it would be difficult to protect non-literal elements unless they exist uniquely in SysV.
"The Linux code I just looked at is lacking the copyright notice like the above."
Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights. Then all that needs to be done is add the copyright notices back in.
Now the important question: How has SCO been monetarily damaged by the lack of BSD copyright notices in a few header files? About 37 cents? 'Cause all they can do is ask for damages and that the copyright notices be fixed.
"My Signal-to-Noise ratio on the article read a whopping zero."
Probably you are not in the intended audience. There are in fact lawyers writing columns saying things like, "If one of your employees edits a file using emacs, all of your company's code will have to be released for free under the GPL." I think the article was aimed at the journalist/pundit audience, which is dangerously confused about the GPL and how it works.
"One of the defenses I've heard from GPL advocates regarding the SCO scandal is that SCO "gifted" their code because they didn't pull their Linux distribution right away."
Note that most of the discussion here is about a completely different situation, illegally including GPLed code in proprietary code. In such a case, the code is never sent out to purchasers with "This code is under the GPL" notices all over it.
SCO knowingly distributed this code with GPL notices. That is a big difference. For example, if they did not consider the kernel to be available under the GPL then they were committing fraud.
>> And the person who receives GPLed code has no obligation toward the original author.
> Sure they do.
They do? What is it? Someone who receives a copy of the kernel from me has no obligation to Linus whatsoever. You cannot claim that their obligation to Linus is to not distribute the kernal illegally any more than their obligation to Linus is to not drive over the speed limit.
"In exchange, you agreed to certain restrictions on that use."
No, I don't agree to anything, and nothing in the GPL restricts what I can do. Nothing at all. The GPL gives me rights that otherwise I do not have. You act like the GPL gives you permission to do anything, and then you give up certain rights, but the truth is that you never had these rights at all.
"A contract is a set of obligations for two or more parties."
Right. And the person who receives GPLed code has no obligation toward the original author. I modified the kernel (ok, it was one line in a.h), and recompiled it, and I don't have to tell anyone about what change I made or give it to them. If I started to distribute my kernel, I would have to include the source or make it available, but I still have no obligation to send anything to Linus. That is why it is not a contract.
"That would suggest, like the lack of consideration, that the GPL isn't enforceable, not that it isn't a contract."
You could say that the GPL is not enforceable, but copyright law is enforceable. If you take my GPLed code, modify it, and sell it as a binary only, you are breaking copyright law. End of story.
"It showed just how much each of the characters had changed from their experiences throughout the books."
Among about a million other things, LotR is a classic "coming of age" tale. Merry and Pippin start out kind of silly and end up mature and experienced. JRRT actually has them grow taller to make it even more obvious that they are like children growing up. In this sense, the book is not over when Sauron is beaten. Perhaps JRRT wants to say that evil in the world is not isolated in obvious bad guys in far away lands, but it also exists and has to be fought in our own neighborhoods.
LotR is full of observations that such things show in multiple levels.
PS: While I don't agree with all his choices, I think the PJ did a fantastic job making the movie he wanted to make.
I personally don't see any problems with closed source binary drivers. The kernel provides (or should provide) interface abstraction to a sensible level where it's possible for safe "black box" drivers to be written.
Linus said in TFA that the kernel does not provide a stable, abstract API for modules. That is the whole point! Most modules, Linus says, can only be written by digging around in the kernel source. He says that in the past the interface for file system module was so simple that they were not necessarily derived, but that increasing complexity has made this no longer possible.
"the lawyers are terrified of "subscription" software (so how much is it next year, or in three years?)"
How much if any subscription software is there in RHEL? The update and support service is by subscription. If you decide not to pay RH any more, you can still use any GPLed software for as long as you like. Red Hat can't hijack GPLed code any more than SCO can. The kernel and the basic system are yours forever.
If you don't need or use the proprietary stuff in RHEL, then you can stop paying Red Hat, keep using the software, and handle updates yourself. People are wetting their pants at the thought that they might need to install a program from a tarball or (heaven forfend!) create their own rpm.
"Something like 90% of the energy needed to get to the Moon is spent just getting to low earth orbit. While it might be an interesting project, a Lagrange point space station isn't going to make space travel much cheaper."
And Aldrin is completely confused about the difference between force and potential and how they relate to L1.
He claims that "L 1 is not the site of strong gravitational pulls, meaning that spacecraft can leave there without using much energy". If you combine the gravity wells of the Earth and the moon, it is true that L 1 sits at a flat spot (in the effective potential including centrifugal force in the rotating reference frame blah blah blah). However, to get to say Mars, you still have to climb out of the gravity well. Being at L 1 does not help you at all in that respect.
L 1 is unstable, as has been mentioned. Still, it may have some useful properties. Will the gravitational geometry make it easier to dock a ship to a space station at L 1 than in a standard orbit?
This shows that we aren't good at looking at a problem and figuring out whether it is a hard problem or an easy problem. Somebody has to really get down in the guts of it and start working before we can even understand the magnitude of the difficulties.
It seems that a great way to find out how little you understand something is to try to program a computer to do it. Something like parsing text seems easy in the abstract. (It must be, because we do it so effortlessly.) The fact that parsing text is much harder than was thought shows that we don't know anything about how humans parse text.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't any meaningful dispute. The agreements with AT&T covering both AIX and Dynix code use "derivative work" in the same way it is understood in all copyright law. There is nothing in the agreement that suggests that code which contains no copyrightable elements of SysV is a derivative work. The famous clause about treating derivative works the same as the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is just a statement of normal copyright protection.
Although she hasn't said so, this is the way the judge sees it. That is why she ruled in December that SCOG gets no discovery from IBM until they make their claims with specificity. They said they can't do this until they get the AIX development codebase from IBM, and the judge ignored them.
You can't just take anything you feel like and put it on your own web site as a mirror. Unless the material is available under a license like the Creative Commons License or the GPL, it would be a copyright violation to redistribute something from someone else's web page. This issue has been battered around in the past.
Do you look at the site's robot.txt to see if they block archiving by sites like google? If they do, it is a good guess they don't want anyone mirroring their content. But copyright protection is not opt-in; the material is protected by copyright law no matter what the robots.txt says.
There is no obvious solution outside of some rewrite of copyright law for the web. Maybe we could invent and publicize a Slashdot License. Get everyone to add a comment to their pages saying, "If a link to this page appears on slashdot, I give anyone permission to mirror the content unmodified for 48 hours."
This is true. But I think what you are saying can be reduced to "wealthy individuals and large corporations don't like following the law, and they will use their influence to try to get what they want regardless." If we let companies violate the copyrights on GPLed code so that they won't attack the GPL, there is no point in having the GPL at all.
Education is our best weapon. Anyone who reads Groklaw will learn that the GPL is easy to understand, easy to follow, does not pose a danger to them, and the free software community is not interested in appropriating proprietary code. (There are a small number of tricky cases in the GPL, but they are easy to avoid.)
The US has certainly killed innocent civilians in the last three years because they were at a location where some public-enemy-of-the-day was thought to have been or because they were around someone who looked like a public-enemy-of-the-day. The Israelis have killed a lot of Palestinians who were not suicide bombers (the suicide bombers are by definition already dead). Morality aside, killing civilians appears to be quite politically feasible.
Don't spread FUD about "viral"-ness of the GPL.
Imagine a janitor somewhere takes a bunch of secret documents and sets them out on the curb as trash, and someone else finds them and reads them. If there were any trade secrets in there, they are not trade secrets any longer.
The next night, the same janitor sits down at a terminal, takes the company's proprietary code, slaps the GPL on the front of it, and puts it on a public web site. Is this code now GPLed? No. The janitor had no authority to license the code, so he cannot release it under the GPL.
Programmers generally don't have the authority to relicense the code they are working on, and, if they do not, they can never cause proprietary code to become GPLed. They can violate copyright, though.
I think you are missing something here. SCO's case against IBM is based on use of RCU, JFS, and so on in violation of a contract. (It almost certainly isn't, but that is not the point here.) This matter is between SCO and IBM.
SCO is claiming that the header files are copyrighted by them. This (in theory) involves anyone who makes a copy of the Linux kernel. If SCO tells some random company not to use Linux because of the RCU dispute, they can answer that that issue is between SCO and IBM. But if SCO tells a company to stop installing copies of Linux because doing so violates SCO's copyrights, then the company has to have someone with enough wits to know that SCO is not correct.
SCO has in effect threatened to sue Linux users. Saying "You need to buy a license from us" implicitly includes "or we will take you to court." The issue of the header files is central to these potential suits against users.
I am not as sure of this as I would like to be.
Isn't it true that opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden were missed because of the delay in interpreting the images and getting permission to fire? (I am not sure of this...) First, imagine putting face-recognition software in the surveillance drones. No reason not to. Then imagine that the drones pick out public-enemy-of-the-day and send a blip back to their controllers, but Mr. Baddy is gone before the humans can react, get permission to fire, and so on. Someone will make the point that Mr. Baddy would be gone of the drone had been allowed to fire based on the face recognition routines, and a large part of the public will be in favor of it.
I don't think this is all that likely, but I would not be surprised the slightest if it did happen.
Excellent point. Maybe what is being missed is that the nature of conflicts will change. Has the existence of nuclear weapons made war obsolete? No. But we have not had all-out war between two countries with nuclear weapons. If the US has a fleet of warrior robots, then conflict will only be provoked in situations where the robots do not confer much advantage. (What does a robot do in a swampy jungle? Or is the plan to only attack countries in the Middle East and Asia that have big open deserts to drive around in?)
The human soldier is more versatile than any robot can ever be. I can put my soldiers somewhere your robots cannot reach, but I cannot put them out of reach of your soldiers. The main effect of the robots may be to prevent any war in which they would be valuable.
Your argument would make more sense if the money not spent on Hubble was going to be spent on the next generation space telescope (ST:tNG?), but it isn't. It would also make more sense if all manned spaceflight was being stopped because of safety considerations, but it isn't.
Compare the scientific value of the HST to that of the space station (or another moon shot or manned mission to Mars). One flight to the Hubble is a lot safer and cheaper than dozens of flights to the space station, and many would say it would produce more scientific value.
When a mistake is made in an article, is it analyzed and corrected? (Yes.)
Are the sources for background facts reliable? (Yes. Most of it comes from court documents and SEC filings, and an occasional question posed to directly to Linus or another expert.)
If anyone, even one of SCOG's lawyers, can come up with a single fact supporting their allegations or a consistent legal argument for their highly original interpretation of copyright law, Groklaw would happily publish it. The truth is that the only way to discuss the current and potential lawsuits is either 1) live in a fantasy world where the law and the facts have no effect or 2) talk badly about SCO. There is no third choice.
What can be done is to try to always tie arguments and opinions to the proveable facts as closely as possible, and this is what the Groklaw stories do.
> This is not true.
I just tried this. Open 2 xterms. Type ls in one, highlight a filename, close the xterm. Middle click in the other xterm, and the text appears. So it is not always true that the data is gone. (Probably some of the time.)
I would add that it has never occurred to me in using X for 15 years to highlight text, close the app, and try to paste the text. Why do that when you have a multitasking OS and a window manager?
You have to be careful to interpret the law using the legal definition of derived work, not a vernacular definition.
A derived work contains material that is covered by copyright taken from another work.
Imagine I take some numbers from a table in your book to make a graph to put in my book. In a colloquial sense you might say my work is derived from yours, but it is not a derived work in the legal sense, because all I took was information, which is not protected under copyright law.
To justify a claim that Linux is a derived work, SCO would need to identify specific elements copied and show that these elements are protected by copyright law. In theory, non-literal elements in the design could be protected, but given the great variety of Unix-y operating systems that exist and the complicated history of their dissemination, it would be difficult to protect non-literal elements unless they exist uniquely in SysV.
Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights. Then all that needs to be done is add the copyright notices back in.
Now the important question: How has SCO been monetarily damaged by the lack of BSD copyright notices in a few header files? About 37 cents? 'Cause all they can do is ask for damages and that the copyright notices be fixed.
Probably you are not in the intended audience. There are in fact lawyers writing columns saying things like, "If one of your employees edits a file using emacs, all of your company's code will have to be released for free under the GPL." I think the article was aimed at the journalist/pundit audience, which is dangerously confused about the GPL and how it works.
Note that most of the discussion here is about a completely different situation, illegally including GPLed code in proprietary code. In such a case, the code is never sent out to purchasers with "This code is under the GPL" notices all over it.
SCO knowingly distributed this code with GPL notices. That is a big difference. For example, if they did not consider the kernel to be available under the GPL then they were committing fraud.
> Sure they do.
They do? What is it? Someone who receives a copy of the kernel from me has no obligation to Linus whatsoever. You cannot claim that their obligation to Linus is to not distribute the kernal illegally any more than their obligation to Linus is to not drive over the speed limit.
No, I don't agree to anything, and nothing in the GPL restricts what I can do. Nothing at all. The GPL gives me rights that otherwise I do not have. You act like the GPL gives you permission to do anything, and then you give up certain rights, but the truth is that you never had these rights at all.
Right. And the person who receives GPLed code has no obligation toward the original author. I modified the kernel (ok, it was one line in a .h), and recompiled it, and I don't have to tell anyone about what change I made or give it to them. If I started to distribute my kernel, I would have to include the source or make it available, but I still have no obligation to send anything to Linus. That is why it is not a contract.
Almost all contracts are verbal, in that they are expressed using words. You probably meant to say "oral".
You could say that the GPL is not enforceable, but copyright law is enforceable. If you take my GPLed code, modify it, and sell it as a binary only, you are breaking copyright law. End of story.
Among about a million other things, LotR is a classic "coming of age" tale. Merry and Pippin start out kind of silly and end up mature and experienced. JRRT actually has them grow taller to make it even more obvious that they are like children growing up. In this sense, the book is not over when Sauron is beaten. Perhaps JRRT wants to say that evil in the world is not isolated in obvious bad guys in far away lands, but it also exists and has to be fought in our own neighborhoods.
LotR is full of observations that such things show in multiple levels.
PS: While I don't agree with all his choices, I think the PJ did a fantastic job making the movie he wanted to make.
Linus said in TFA that the kernel does not provide a stable, abstract API for modules. That is the whole point! Most modules, Linus says, can only be written by digging around in the kernel source. He says that in the past the interface for file system module was so simple that they were not necessarily derived, but that increasing complexity has made this no longer possible.
How much if any subscription software is there in RHEL? The update and support service is by subscription. If you decide not to pay RH any more, you can still use any GPLed software for as long as you like. Red Hat can't hijack GPLed code any more than SCO can. The kernel and the basic system are yours forever.
If you don't need or use the proprietary stuff in RHEL, then you can stop paying Red Hat, keep using the software, and handle updates yourself. People are wetting their pants at the thought that they might need to install a program from a tarball or (heaven forfend!) create their own rpm.
And Aldrin is completely confused about the difference between force and potential and how they relate to L1.
He claims that "L 1 is not the site of strong gravitational pulls, meaning that spacecraft can leave there without using much energy". If you combine the gravity wells of the Earth and the moon, it is true that L 1 sits at a flat spot (in the effective potential including centrifugal force in the rotating reference frame blah blah blah). However, to get to say Mars, you still have to climb out of the gravity well. Being at L 1 does not help you at all in that respect.
L 1 is unstable, as has been mentioned. Still, it may have some useful properties. Will the gravitational geometry make it easier to dock a ship to a space station at L 1 than in a standard orbit?
It seems that a great way to find out how little you understand something is to try to program a computer to do it. Something like parsing text seems easy in the abstract. (It must be, because we do it so effortlessly.) The fact that parsing text is much harder than was thought shows that we don't know anything about how humans parse text.