If SCO is claiming to be distributing their own 100 lines under non-GPL compatible terms then they have a problem. You may not distribute GPL code together with non-GPL compatible licensed code at all.
There is no need to revoke anything, it happens automatically as the GPL is the only thing granting them the right to distribute Linux. If they violate the terms of the GPL they have no right to distribute Linux at all. If they still do it they're engaged in criminal copyright violation for profit, and would face huge fines and jail time.
Now, this must be the final proof that McBride is delerious:
"You go back to SCO's brand in the 1990s and it was Unix on Intel. SCO was primed to seize the multibillion-dollar server market of Unix on Intel that hit in the early 2000s that has in fact shifted over to Red Hat."
SCO was primed to go down the drain, even without Linux anywhere. Most people were already migrating or had migrated off SCO before Linux became a contender; migrating to Solaris or Windows, or basically anything that wasnt quite as bad as SCO.
The man is completely delusional and should be locked up in a small padded room for his own good.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you show me some examples where RMS has made damaging comments in situations such as this? In fact, in most of the speeches I've heard or read he comes across articulating his views in a very sane, coherent and convincing manner.
Not to say he cant be goaded, but that's not very relevant to a non-geek audience.
I'd by far prefer RMS talking about these issues rather than Linus Torvalds. Linus is a tech guy from beginning to end, and I havent seen many comments from him wrt patents and copyright that amount to much more than 'lets bury our heads in the sand and hope it goes away'. You'd even be hard pressed to get him to make a comment on legal issues surrounding the Linux kernel itself. I'm not sure you can call "unwilling to comment" a "moderate" position.
RMS by contrast has been immersed in free software philosophy and the politics and legal aspects of it for a long time now. He's used to making speeches to non-geeks about these issues.
Say what? "Intellectual property" isnt very narrowly defined at all, nor is it a strictly legal term. It's more a jumbled up hodgepodge referring to everything from trademarks through copyrights to patents, all of which are extrordinarily different legal concepts with little to do with eachother. There is no real underlying discussion because the concepts are so different that it's impossible to have a single coherent discussion about such varied subjects.
In fact, the term is so grossly and widely used and misused that it should ring about the same warning bells as 'internet startup'. It means you're about to get a bunch of bullshit thrown at you regarding a hyped up term that the person doing the talking is probably not very qualified to talk about.
If your product is dependent on GPL project A you're already likely in trouble. You may be violating the copyright of the GPL project due to not fulfilling the terms of the GPL on the project with regard to your product.
If your product isnt dependent on the GPL project then why are you distributing GPL software with a product rather than pointing your customers to the upstream source?
You always have to review the code of A or you have no buisness distributing it. That might get you in trouble.
If you discover a problem with A then why are you like SCO still distributing it after realizing the code may have a problem?
Finally, if your product is competetive with free software on the basis of a few lines out of millions you frankly deserve to get obliterated from the market. You should have been spending more on R&D rather than cool parties and cars.
I'm all for copyrights that encourage people to publish work. I'm not for copyrights that encourage people to sit on their ass doing nothing or to prevent others from publishing independent works. I see more of the last than I do of the first these days.
If they get the GPL invalidated then they themselves are liable for thousands or hundreds of thousands of accounts of copyright violation (as they are not under the GPL allowed to distribute GPL code together with less Free code). They'd be liable for every instance of copying anything any author had placed under the GPL in the Linux kernel.
That would be a very bad buisness strategy and an even worse life strategy for their executives, considering that willful copyright violation for profit entails several thousands of dollars of fines per instance as well as jail time.
Ok, so try to get another Free OS by trying to throw away all GNU code and try doing it by throwing away all Linux code.
Which attempt will be successful?
Hint: You can build multiple Free OS's using the GNU system, but AFAIK you cannot build any freely redistributable OS without using various components of the GNU system.
RMS is a visionary. He may be speaking on a level you have difficulty comprehending but that just means you should question your own understanding rather than RMS's obsessiveness.
Had it not been for the FSF's creation in the GPL SCO may very well have a legal point. They'd be entirely free to release their own code under specific license to their own customers, and any BSD or similar licensed code would be fine to distribute with it. However, as GNU/Linux is under the GPL, SCO cannot at the same time be freely distributing Linux while at the same time trying to withhold any derivative code. Which means that either they themselves are liable for thousands or hundreds of thousands of act of copyright infringement or nobody is in any legal trouble over any SCO code included in Linux. Thanks entirely to the GPL.
The FSFs philosophical ideals and the GPL are creations of genious. RMS is largely, by his very obsession, responsible for that. If you have a problem with software being free as in free speech you should argue from that point (very valid point, although I personally put the advancement of humanity in front of the advancement of individual copyright holders and reinventing the wheel hundreds of times).
If RMS wasnt so obsessively fanatical you might be recieving your summons for allegedly pirating SCO IP any day now. You should be thinking about that.
There has been multiple challanges to the GPL, however, none has made it to court, because every company getting the call from the FSF has folded and complied on the recommendation from their lawyers.
As far as I've heard, the FSF counsel is itching for a test case... there just dont seem to be any volunteers.
Damages would be the same as for copyright violations. Copyright violation is a crime, and it has pretty hefty fines, especially if done for profit. Plus of course jail time. What exact damages would go to the copyright holder in a potential civil suit would be over and above that, of course.
I dont think you can get anyone elses license terminated by getting your own license declared invalid. Even if the GPL became invalid for SCO, only their license would revert to copyright, which means everyone else could go on doing what they want.
So, a successful challange against the GPL would just mean that anyone who wanted could go to court for the ability to lose their right to distribute GPL software. Great. They'd obtain the legal right to shoot themselves in the foot.
So, if I obtain the sourcecode to Windows, add a few lines of code and sell it as my own really cool "Windows" I wont get sued by MS? Riiiight.
That isnt a GPL issue, that's a copyright issue and it's the same if you try to distribute anyones software without the right to do so. It's exactly the same unpleasant nastiness wether it's proprietary or GPL.
Of course, SCO's customers arent liable in any way for SCO's GPL violations. The GPL covers distribution, and unless those customers are distributing SCO's product they would not be in any trouble (if they were, they would have to be granted a GPL compatible license for SCO's code, or they would be infringing for the rest of the code tho). SCO themselves on the other hand would be forced to either distribute their code under GPL compatible terms or they would be infringing by distributing other peoples GPL code.
Actually, they can do whatever they want with their IP. They just cant do whatever they want with others IP. As Linux is GPL, SCO is either violating copyright law on a massive scale by distributing Linux together with SCO proprietary IP, or they have to release their IP under GPL. They're perfectly free to do either, only in one case they're open to massive fines that would make their IBM lawsuit seem modest plus jailtime for copyright violations (of other peoples copyrighted but GPL'ed code), and in the other they have to release their code under a GPL compatible license and cant sue anyone.
I dont do MS tech support for family and friends. I do do Linux tech support for them, and in fact it's not at all bad. For them, they're not logged in as root, and it 'just works' for their email and websurfing and spreadsheet/word processor needs. They can even let their (2-5 yearold) kids play with it, since I set up a simple script with an icon for the parents to use if the kid messes up their desktop. Just click the icon and it'll wipe and restore the home directory for the kid.
I think they're talking about things like (from the article) "author, contents, names, source medium and the most recent user".
Me, I think they need to stop drinking heavily on their engineering meetings. This kind of info has no place in the filesystem, and they're confusing the presentation layer with the OS filemanagement.
I think I understand what they're trying to accomplish, but I can think of (off the top of my head) several ways to make a cleaner implementation, ranging from allowing metadata fields in the filesystem (and indexing those) to the implementation I'd like best; a separate database and daemon that gets notifications of file updates and tries to extract the metadata from the actual file and then proceeds to index everything. That way you dont need to mess around with the filesystem and can still offer indexed searches and such to the presentation layer.
But if you implement the filesystem as a database you're sacrificing simplicity, reliablity and performance for features of dubious value. Which would violate most good engineering principles.
Heck, where I work we junked SCO years ago. And no, it didnt get replaced by Linux, it got replaced by pretty much anything that could conceivably run the applications. Nobody wanted to admin it, nobody wanted to be responsible for supporting it and nobody really wanted to use it if there were alternatives.
SCO has absolutely no claim whatsoever to do anything at all to any Linux users. The amount of code talked about is so little it would pass under fair use quoting, it would be have been done in good faith if it has been done, they'd have to prove it's their code in linux and not linux code in SCO (I personally think SCO's the one who's been doing any cut'n'paste here), they'd have to get out of the problem that they themselves have been distributing the code as part of their linux distribution and as such released it under GPL and even if they did 'win' they'd just get an order to remove the code in question which could be done in days.
Since they basically cant get shit out of flinging around Linux lawsuits they'll have to go against IBM on the claim that IBM did something nasty during the Monterey project. Hang the blame for their collapsing market onto IBM's alleged leakage and claim damages for it (god forbid anyone should realize their market is collapsing because their products completely, totally and utterly suck compared to pretty much anything written in the last decade).
They're gonna get smacked around so bad they dont know what hit them.
Re:Demonstrating my ignorance....
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If there are enough similarities out in the open now, it should be enough evidence to launch a copyright violation countersuit against SCO. That at least should make it possible to force SCO to disclose the code for review so it can be determined wether or not SCO has copied code from Linux.
Actually, with the claims that there is code that is the same in Linux and SCO's products, that should be enough to file a lawsuit against SCO for copyright violation. Then demand that SCO disclose the source (without any NDA) so a review of SCO's code can be done and so it can be determined if they indeed have violated the GPL and by extension engaged in copyright violations.
If it's any AT&T day code it probably stems from BSD, in which case it's already been to court and freed.
If it's in newer code I'd suggest someone sue SCO for copyright violation as it's probably someone at SCO who's stolen it from Linux. Motive and opportunity... both point quite clearly at them, as they've been constantly left behind technically by Linux since the mid nineties, not to mention it's a lot easier for someone at SCO to obtain linux code than it is the other way around.
I'd like to see them prove that SCO doesnt have Linux code. Considering that as their products have been consistently outpaced by Linux since the mid 90's, and that Linux code is easily available, they both have more motive and opportunity to copy code from Linux into their own products than anyone would have to copy SCO code into Linux.
I was very relieved the day we finally shut off the last SCO stuff we had. It wasnt even migrated to Linux, but to various other platforms.
It will be a happy day when the company is dead and gone and nobody has to suffer from using their crap anymore.
No, they'll hardly switch to F#. F# does not seem even close to as hardcore functional as it would need to be to satisfy the "theoretically really interesting but completely unusable when it accidentally collides with reality" requirement of CS that ML or Haskell provides.
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If SCO is claiming to be distributing their own 100 lines under non-GPL compatible terms then they have a problem. You may not distribute GPL code together with non-GPL compatible licensed code at all.
There is no need to revoke anything, it happens automatically as the GPL is the only thing granting them the right to distribute Linux. If they violate the terms of the GPL they have no right to distribute Linux at all. If they still do it they're engaged in criminal copyright violation for profit, and would face huge fines and jail time.
Now, this must be the final proof that McBride is delerious:
"You go back to SCO's brand in the 1990s and it was Unix on Intel. SCO was primed to seize the multibillion-dollar server market of Unix on Intel that hit in the early 2000s that has in fact shifted over to Red Hat."
SCO was primed to go down the drain, even without Linux anywhere. Most people were already migrating or had migrated off SCO before Linux became a contender; migrating to Solaris or Windows, or basically anything that wasnt quite as bad as SCO.
The man is completely delusional and should be locked up in a small padded room for his own good.
Because RMS is obsessively fanatical enough about free software to create the GPL that means Linux is safe from SCO's claims.
Of course, BSD licensed software would not in the same way be immune to a similar claim from SCO.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you show me some examples where RMS has made damaging comments in situations such as this? In fact, in most of the speeches I've heard or read he comes across articulating his views in a very sane, coherent and convincing manner.
Not to say he cant be goaded, but that's not very relevant to a non-geek audience.
I'd by far prefer RMS talking about these issues rather than Linus Torvalds. Linus is a tech guy from beginning to end, and I havent seen many comments from him wrt patents and copyright that amount to much more than 'lets bury our heads in the sand and hope it goes away'. You'd even be hard pressed to get him to make a comment on legal issues surrounding the Linux kernel itself. I'm not sure you can call "unwilling to comment" a "moderate" position.
RMS by contrast has been immersed in free software philosophy and the politics and legal aspects of it for a long time now. He's used to making speeches to non-geeks about these issues.
Say what? "Intellectual property" isnt very narrowly defined at all, nor is it a strictly legal term. It's more a jumbled up hodgepodge referring to everything from trademarks through copyrights to patents, all of which are extrordinarily different legal concepts with little to do with eachother. There is no real underlying discussion because the concepts are so different that it's impossible to have a single coherent discussion about such varied subjects.
In fact, the term is so grossly and widely used and misused that it should ring about the same warning bells as 'internet startup'. It means you're about to get a bunch of bullshit thrown at you regarding a hyped up term that the person doing the talking is probably not very qualified to talk about.
If your product is dependent on GPL project A you're already likely in trouble. You may be violating the copyright of the GPL project due to not fulfilling the terms of the GPL on the project with regard to your product.
If your product isnt dependent on the GPL project then why are you distributing GPL software with a product rather than pointing your customers to the upstream source?
You always have to review the code of A or you have no buisness distributing it. That might get you in trouble.
If you discover a problem with A then why are you like SCO still distributing it after realizing the code may have a problem?
Finally, if your product is competetive with free software on the basis of a few lines out of millions you frankly deserve to get obliterated from the market. You should have been spending more on R&D rather than cool parties and cars.
I'm all for copyrights that encourage people to publish work. I'm not for copyrights that encourage people to sit on their ass doing nothing or to prevent others from publishing independent works. I see more of the last than I do of the first these days.
If they get the GPL invalidated then they themselves are liable for thousands or hundreds of thousands of accounts of copyright violation (as they are not under the GPL allowed to distribute GPL code together with less Free code). They'd be liable for every instance of copying anything any author had placed under the GPL in the Linux kernel.
That would be a very bad buisness strategy and an even worse life strategy for their executives, considering that willful copyright violation for profit entails several thousands of dollars of fines per instance as well as jail time.
Ok, so try to get another Free OS by trying to throw away all GNU code and try doing it by throwing away all Linux code.
Which attempt will be successful?
Hint: You can build multiple Free OS's using the GNU system, but AFAIK you cannot build any freely redistributable OS without using various components of the GNU system.
I call that rather important contributions.
RMS is a visionary. He may be speaking on a level you have difficulty comprehending but that just means you should question your own understanding rather than RMS's obsessiveness.
Had it not been for the FSF's creation in the GPL SCO may very well have a legal point. They'd be entirely free to release their own code under specific license to their own customers, and any BSD or similar licensed code would be fine to distribute with it. However, as GNU/Linux is under the GPL, SCO cannot at the same time be freely distributing Linux while at the same time trying to withhold any derivative code. Which means that either they themselves are liable for thousands or hundreds of thousands of act of copyright infringement or nobody is in any legal trouble over any SCO code included in Linux. Thanks entirely to the GPL.
The FSFs philosophical ideals and the GPL are creations of genious. RMS is largely, by his very obsession, responsible for that. If you have a problem with software being free as in free speech you should argue from that point (very valid point, although I personally put the advancement of humanity in front of the advancement of individual copyright holders and reinventing the wheel hundreds of times).
If RMS wasnt so obsessively fanatical you might be recieving your summons for allegedly pirating SCO IP any day now. You should be thinking about that.
Try running ldd on those things you're running and see how many of them are not linked to libc.so...
There has been multiple challanges to the GPL, however, none has made it to court, because every company getting the call from the FSF has folded and complied on the recommendation from their lawyers.
As far as I've heard, the FSF counsel is itching for a test case... there just dont seem to be any volunteers.
Damages would be the same as for copyright violations. Copyright violation is a crime, and it has pretty hefty fines, especially if done for profit. Plus of course jail time. What exact damages would go to the copyright holder in a potential civil suit would be over and above that, of course.
I dont think you can get anyone elses license terminated by getting your own license declared invalid. Even if the GPL became invalid for SCO, only their license would revert to copyright, which means everyone else could go on doing what they want.
So, a successful challange against the GPL would just mean that anyone who wanted could go to court for the ability to lose their right to distribute GPL software. Great. They'd obtain the legal right to shoot themselves in the foot.
So, if I obtain the sourcecode to Windows, add a few lines of code and sell it as my own really cool "Windows" I wont get sued by MS? Riiiight.
That isnt a GPL issue, that's a copyright issue and it's the same if you try to distribute anyones software without the right to do so. It's exactly the same unpleasant nastiness wether it's proprietary or GPL.
Of course, SCO's customers arent liable in any way for SCO's GPL violations. The GPL covers distribution, and unless those customers are distributing SCO's product they would not be in any trouble (if they were, they would have to be granted a GPL compatible license for SCO's code, or they would be infringing for the rest of the code tho). SCO themselves on the other hand would be forced to either distribute their code under GPL compatible terms or they would be infringing by distributing other peoples GPL code.
Actually, they can do whatever they want with their IP. They just cant do whatever they want with others IP. As Linux is GPL, SCO is either violating copyright law on a massive scale by distributing Linux together with SCO proprietary IP, or they have to release their IP under GPL. They're perfectly free to do either, only in one case they're open to massive fines that would make their IBM lawsuit seem modest plus jailtime for copyright violations (of other peoples copyrighted but GPL'ed code), and in the other they have to release their code under a GPL compatible license and cant sue anyone.
"Per infringement" means "per copy you make". If they make and sell 1000 copies, they commit 1000 infringements.
I dont do MS tech support for family and friends. I do do Linux tech support for them, and in fact it's not at all bad. For them, they're not logged in as root, and it 'just works' for their email and websurfing and spreadsheet/word processor needs. They can even let their (2-5 yearold) kids play with it, since I set up a simple script with an icon for the parents to use if the kid messes up their desktop. Just click the icon and it'll wipe and restore the home directory for the kid.
I think they're talking about things like (from the article) "author, contents, names, source medium and the most recent user".
Me, I think they need to stop drinking heavily on their engineering meetings. This kind of info has no place in the filesystem, and they're confusing the presentation layer with the OS filemanagement.
I think I understand what they're trying to accomplish, but I can think of (off the top of my head) several ways to make a cleaner implementation, ranging from allowing metadata fields in the filesystem (and indexing those) to the implementation I'd like best; a separate database and daemon that gets notifications of file updates and tries to extract the metadata from the actual file and then proceeds to index everything. That way you dont need to mess around with the filesystem and can still offer indexed searches and such to the presentation layer.
But if you implement the filesystem as a database you're sacrificing simplicity, reliablity and performance for features of dubious value. Which would violate most good engineering principles.
Heck, where I work we junked SCO years ago. And no, it didnt get replaced by Linux, it got replaced by pretty much anything that could conceivably run the applications. Nobody wanted to admin it, nobody wanted to be responsible for supporting it and nobody really wanted to use it if there were alternatives.
This mess is just yet another reason to dump SCO.
SCO has absolutely no claim whatsoever to do anything at all to any Linux users. The amount of code talked about is so little it would pass under fair use quoting, it would be have been done in good faith if it has been done, they'd have to prove it's their code in linux and not linux code in SCO (I personally think SCO's the one who's been doing any cut'n'paste here), they'd have to get out of the problem that they themselves have been distributing the code as part of their linux distribution and as such released it under GPL and even if they did 'win' they'd just get an order to remove the code in question which could be done in days.
Since they basically cant get shit out of flinging around Linux lawsuits they'll have to go against IBM on the claim that IBM did something nasty during the Monterey project. Hang the blame for their collapsing market onto IBM's alleged leakage and claim damages for it (god forbid anyone should realize their market is collapsing because their products completely, totally and utterly suck compared to pretty much anything written in the last decade).
They're gonna get smacked around so bad they dont know what hit them.
If there are enough similarities out in the open now, it should be enough evidence to launch a copyright violation countersuit against SCO. That at least should make it possible to force SCO to disclose the code for review so it can be determined wether or not SCO has copied code from Linux.
Actually, with the claims that there is code that is the same in Linux and SCO's products, that should be enough to file a lawsuit against SCO for copyright violation. Then demand that SCO disclose the source (without any NDA) so a review of SCO's code can be done and so it can be determined if they indeed have violated the GPL and by extension engaged in copyright violations.
If it's any AT&T day code it probably stems from BSD, in which case it's already been to court and freed.
If it's in newer code I'd suggest someone sue SCO for copyright violation as it's probably someone at SCO who's stolen it from Linux. Motive and opportunity... both point quite clearly at them, as they've been constantly left behind technically by Linux since the mid nineties, not to mention it's a lot easier for someone at SCO to obtain linux code than it is the other way around.
I'd like to see them prove that SCO doesnt have Linux code. Considering that as their products have been consistently outpaced by Linux since the mid 90's, and that Linux code is easily available, they both have more motive and opportunity to copy code from Linux into their own products than anyone would have to copy SCO code into Linux.
I was very relieved the day we finally shut off the last SCO stuff we had. It wasnt even migrated to Linux, but to various other platforms.
It will be a happy day when the company is dead and gone and nobody has to suffer from using their crap anymore.
No, they'll hardly switch to F#. F# does not seem even close to as hardcore functional as it would need to be to satisfy the "theoretically really interesting but completely unusable when it accidentally collides with reality" requirement of CS that ML or Haskell provides.