There is nothing about Gnome or many other such software projects that could not have been done in South America, except for the fact that it usually just happens up north first
You've summed it up best right there. Stop, re-read that and you will get my point. I've said twice now that there's nothing special about the nations I'm pointing out as the hubs of the current technical world other than their current status as hubs of the technical world.
you are deeply misguided. The US/Mexico border is far less porous, from this perspective, than you imagine
You have no idea what I imagine, so keep your theories to yourself.
Miguel's education was in no sense a product of the proximity of the US
Up until the mid 90s, just being physically close to the US or a European country was a huge boon in terms of getting access to the Internet, or at least UUCP.
Did he have a PC? Was that more or less likely for being in a NAFTA nation? Guess which nation most of the tech in Mexico comes from?
Actually Miguel reads Slashdot from time to time, perhaps he'll stop by and weigh in. I personally don't think that if he had grown un in Brazil that Gnome would have happened, but there *are* some very impressive technologies that have come out of South America (look at the work done on the 2.4 Linux kernel), so it's not black-and-white.
I'm not trying to say that everyone else in the world is backwards, I'm just saying that there's an obvious technology gap, as represented on any chart of IP allocation, code contributions, machines per household, cross-border patent grants, etc, etc. These are not facts that are usually held in dispute....
The GP hulls were always my favorite Niven idea (though flash-crowds were pretty cool). The idea of a single-molecule macroscopic structure is just so freaky that I *want* to see one!:)
Nova recently had a great episode about IVF and other techniques. Some of it was actually kind of scary, like the tech in a fertility clinic who explained why multiple births are so common. His take was that it's all market pressure. If women look at the statistics for a fertility clinic, they will see that some percentage of all IVFs resulted in birth. Well, if you cram 5 viable eggs back in, instead of 2, you *are* more likely to get multiples, but you're also less likely to damage your success record in terms of viable implantations....
a lot of the tech on the web is built from non-US people.
Yes, but point out some tech that was developed outside of the G8 and their satelite nations (e.g. I count Mexico, Gnome's origin, as a US satelite and all of Europe as part of the UK/Germany/France triangle.
Nations like South Africa do contribute, but only in relatively small ways. Is that because they're stupid? Of course not! But the reality is that large technology infrastructures cost trillions of dollars to produce, and spending that kind of money requires some serious means and motivation. The US and Europe had both during the Cold War.
What I find interesting is Australia's contributions. I frankly don't understand why Australia is so technically literate. Not that it's bad, but I am curious what factors pushed them to develop their tech so much.
You are making the point that I made originally, and so I agree with you;-) See my comments in this posting.
You are replying to a side-discussion on the specifics of copyright law WRT yanking a copyrighted document from a person who recieved it thinking that they were given the file by someone who had the right to do so, but then found out otherwise.
I've been corrected on the point, and am still awaiting confirmation from my lawyer. I would be very happy to be wrong, but I'm skeptical (as, I guess, I should be).
Thanks for the info, I'll take that back to my lawyer for review.
As for the GPL question goes, I agree that their continued distribution of Linux under the GPL should be sufficient for a judge to find against SCO. But it's much better, I think, to have a convincing case using several different arguments, not just one.
Well, hold up there a sec... The judge is going to rule on IBM vs SCO in terms of IBM's contract with USL (now owned by SCO). That case might go either way, depending on what the contract says, and we cannot know that. The fact that the code was GPLed by SCO is moot if SCO's contract with IBM says that IBM will keep this information as a trade secret, EVEN IN THE EVENT that IBM obtains it elsewhere. Remember that little worry about the SCO NDA having this rider? That's why people get worried about that kind of language.
Personally, I think IBM will win, but even if they lose, WE win because of the GPL and SCO's use of same.
As for having many arguments, I agree. I was only re-re-re-pointing out the fact that all of this is moot in the face of the GPL (for us, at least), because my comments could otherwise be interpreted as supporting SCO's arguments, which I feel are chiefly designed to mooch money from the open source community that helped build Caldera to the point that they could buy SCO. If anything they deserve to have every open source license include a new proviso: "these terms are granted to anyone who wishes to accept them, unless your company's name is three letters long and ends in S-C-O.";-)
The US Greencard already has all of this. Here's the data that goes into the greencard (I know this because I worked on it, but all of this is public):
Fingerprints (including the raw images and the derived info describing the fingerprint that can be searched for in a database).
Signature (data file containing scanned version)
Face (again, scanned)
Facial recognition reference data (? I think)
Various textual information one would find in a passport.
Laser-etched images of all US Presidents up to Clinton (if you look on the optical stripe on the back, that odd top line is actually a something-thousand DPI row of images) and various other counter-counterfiet items which range from trivial to very difficult to defeat.
The greencard project was pretty fun, and I only worked on it briefly (no, I can't help you get one, I have no real ties to the folks that took over the project, and the project was run well so that "inside" information really didn't help you much -- everything I know that isn't useless serial driver crap, you can pretty much get by reading the press releases).
The really funny part for me was the requirement that the card needed to be durable enough to remain readable for up to 5 years, stored in the shoe of a migrant worker. QA on that has to suck;-)
Users don't need a license to use copyrighted programs anymore than they need to pay a copyright fee before reading Gone with the Wind. If you copy, distribute, or modify copyrighted material, then you can be in copyright violation,
You're taking this out of context. It's one thing to have a legal copy of a work, and then use it in accordance with your fair use rights.
It's entirely another thing to retain a work that you recieved in an illegal transaction. The copyright owner does apparently have the right to confiscate the illegally copied work, and don't kid yourself into thinking that the authorities would not help them do so.
Again, a moot point in this case, as SCO has donated this software to the community by putting it under the GPL and distributing it ever since the beginning of this mess.
All requests come in on the same IP, they all leave on the same IP
Well, yes and no. One of F5's early claims to fame was their implementation of topographically unique inbound and outbound paths. Granted, the IP never changed, but "on the same IP" is ambiguous in your above statement.
but there's a bank of machines on the internal network serving the request. It's transparent to the end user...no www-16 prepended to the URL, unless you want it there
That's called load balancing, or address aggegation, or whatever your vendor of choice calls it. Every device that is capable of more than simple switching can do this, now.
Where in copyright law is there any requirement for people who have received infringing works to either destroy those works or compensate the rights holder for the infringement?
Not sure of the specifics really, but I consulted a lawyer who is well versed in intellectual property law as applied to software when AOL told people who downloaded Nullsoft's recent mistaken "release" that the software was put up for download without authorization.
My specific question was, "I know they can't revoke the GPL, but if the person who put it up was acting on his own, against company policy, then the GPL isn't being applied by someone with the right to do so, so what does that mean for the people who downloaded it? Do they have to destroy it as AOL requests?" The answer was "Yes."
His reasoning as he stated it to me was that they had a reasonable claim to innocence in the matter right up until AOL asked them to delete it. At that point, you can't keep it on the grounds that you didn't know it was given to you by someone who didn't have the rights to.
If you want to argue that logic, I suggest you do so with a lawyer, I'm just repeating what I was told.
It's more complex than you suggest. I think the best way to approach this is this: SCO has distributed, and continues to distribute Linux source on their public FTP server. Unless they can demonstrate SCO code that was put into the kernel after 2.4.13, then they can simply shut up and go away.
There may be code in 2.5 that was donated by IBM for multiprocessor locking. If that code is found to have been contributed in violation of IBM's contract with SCO, then 2.6 may have to be yanked. I will probably wait for hard data to come out of the courtroom before moving to 2.6, but that's not much of a hardship given that 2.6 isn't due to be released for quite some time.
They are saying that they will license your existing binary version of Linux. They will not grant you a source license, however.
This is perfectly legit. Only SCO's silly and rather toothless claims are bogus, the licensing idea is fine. Keep in mind that if SCO's claims were true, the GPL goes poof on Linux, and no one has a license to distribute. What's more, everyone would have to destroy their existing copies, since they got it in a manner that is legally equivalent to downloading a copyrighted song from Gnutella.
All SCO is saying is that THEY won't come after you for continuing to use Linux, if you pay them up front. It's a protection racket, but a legal one.
I really don't understand why you think that Linus is going to turn around and say, "you have no right to distribute SCO's code, stop or I'll sue."
It's not like you hurt Linus by doing so (he can create and distribute a SCO-free version, after all). It doesn't hurt Linux.
Now, if you try to use this as an EXCUSE to do something that the community would already be against (e.g. distributing a binary-only kernel), then I would not put it past Linus et al. to sue you for what they could have sued over without SCO's involvement. But that's a totally different issue, and has nothing to do with Red Hat shipping a source/binary version of Linux under the usual terms, that they got from Linus and then getting sued by Linus for it. I don't see that ever happening.
It's all moot anyway, since SCO is still shipping Linux source from their public Web site, under the terms of the GPL. *They* have put the code under the GPL, so while IBM and SCO can duke out their contractual dispute, the impact to the Linux community is that we get a lot of free press.
You're turning that inside out. Are you suggesting that Linus would sue Red Hat to get them to stop shipping the Linux kernel to their customers?! If not, then why would Red Hat's distribution of Linux to you be a problem? All SCO is saying is that if you pay them "protection" money, they won't sue you. That's really it.
That was in the file linux.spec, in the distributed linux-2.4.13-21S.src.rpm, which was dated May 3 08:46. That was on their public FTP server, which I downloaded at Jul 21 16:05.
On thier site, the timestamp on the SRPM file was 5/9/03 17:51:00
Ammusingly enough, the first entry in the changelog is:
* Wed May 02 2003 Varun Sethi <varuns@sco.com> 2.4.13-21 - updated IBM ServeRAID 6.x drivers - erg712269 - erg712288
Also from the spec file. Heh, fixing an IBM RAID driver... oh, their prophetic souls.
Inside the SRPM, I do not see anything that could indicate that SCO does not wish to distribute this code under the terms of the GPL. As such, I believe that I am now the owner of a SCO-issued license to use, distribute and modify Linux source code as of version 2.4.13 (the entire tar-file for that version is contained in SRPM as a discrete and separarable file which also contains a copy of the GPL).
If you area a lawyer, and you read this, please speak up. I would like to know what my rights are here and to what extent I can re-distribute and modify this work in accordance with its stated license.
SCO is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They continue to support thier Linux customers with distributions of source code licensed under the GPL while saying that no one but they have the right to do so (staunchly ignoring the terms of their own licensing of the Linux soruce code). My head is spinning. Clearly there is a deck involved here, and it's not quite full. Is it mine?
Interesting. Someone else had said that it was gone. I'm downloading that now to see if it mentions anything (if it's just a huge README file that says, "UnixWare rocks, Linux sucks" over and over).
But even if SCO owned bits and pieces of the current Linux kernel, the result would simply be that nobody could redistribute Linux anymore until SCO's pieces are removed
Well, no not really. If you receive a copyrighted work from a source that did not have the right to license it to you, you can claim that you didn't know. That means that you can't be sued for copyright violation (assuming that no one can prove you're lying). But you *are* required to "give it back" (in the case of software or other electronic works, that means deleting and sending back the media). It's not *your* distribution of it that is at question, it is *your vendor's* distribution to you. If that was not legit, then you cannot reasonably use the software.
What SCO is saying (again, I'm not saying they're the good guys here) is that they will write you a license that says they won't come after *you* for failing to remove Linux (and thus their code) from your systems.
Problems with SCO's claim are well documented, and I cannot imagine that they intend to win this, but they have every right to issue a license for their own work (if it is) and it would mean exactly what they claim it would mean in that case.
You can't go check the GPL for confirmation of this. If SCO is right, and the code is not IBM's to have contributed, then indeed, it was not Linus' to distribute, nor SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, etc. That means that the GPL goes poof!, and no one but SCO's licensees can continue to *use* (not just distribute) this code, unless they got it from SCO.
The catch (again, well documented elsewhere) is that we *all* got the code from SCO when they distributed it under the GPL for 2 months after they started this whole thing. When all is said and done, Linux code that SCO has claim over (if any) was put under the GPL by SCO *after* their claim was issued and made available from their FTP servers. They have no right to sue anyone on the basis of not having a license (though they could sue someone on the basis of violating the GPL, if they had).
SCO is in for a world of hurt when the law suits come flowing in. Everything sits on IBM for the first step. SCO's only hope is that IBM settles, in which case all of the parties that are waiting to sue SCO would be at square zero in terms of having to demonstrate the facts. That would help SCO a bit, but I still think at least SCO stockholders will sue.
No you mis-read. They're offering a license for the binary, not the binary. If they do, in fact, offer the binary itself, then they are violating the GPL by now also distributing source.
If, on the other hand they say, "your existing license is invalid, here have another." Then they are in the right. They cannot license the GPLed pieces, but that's fine. You can demonstrate that you received those pieces under the GPL.
It's an ugly use of the GPL, and companies like Red Hat will be 100% screwed by this.
That's ok, though, because the current odds on SCO winning this case are somewhere around the odds of the Red Sox winning the Superbowl right after the Triple Crown;-)
Repeat after me: You can't distribute Linux for 2 months under the GPL *after* claiming it contains your code, and *then* remove it from distribution. It's out there. It's GPLed. They're done. All they have left is a contractual dispute with IBM that affects no one by IBM and SCO.
Oh, and by the way IBM is likely to win that one too.
Congratulations -- you've missed my point completely!
No, I didn't, but your answer indicates that you missed mine. Rather than just asserting that blindly, though, let me point out WHERE you missed it:
If any developer is concerned that the LGPL license requires them to Open Source their code that links my API, I'll tell them I don't read things that way
That was YOUR original comment, to which I was replying. Note that you were talking about a concern that is not actually part of this discussion (your code becoming open source). Thus, I pointed out that fact, while introducing some other information which you have ignored. The concern is that one's code becomes a derived work, governed by the terms of the LGPL. What's worse, you are often not the licensor, so your take on the license doesn't really matter. Most times, the licensor is a third party who might not read the license the way you do, and might well sue on the basis of that license.
Your interpretation then goes out the window, because it's really only useful in terms of throwing in your face and saying "then, why did you sue". There's no other legal weight to it, since you are not a party to this agreement, except in the sense that your license restricted the option in terms of license selection, of the sub-licensor. Had your license said, "and you agree not to sue on the basis of any interpretation of this license, other than the original author's, then you would have some say. But you did not.
I welcome a discussion on these topics, but unfounded sarcasm doesn't work well on me.
They're hardly going to take you to court over something like this. This only ever happens when they interpret the license as being _less_ restrictive
Agreed, but woefully, the licensor being sued isn't really the concern here, it's how many people will never use your software because they fear the license.
So, this interviewer asked me to look at a picture and tell him what I saw. I told him it was too embarasing....
He said, "No, it's ok. Everyone sees something different."
So I told him, "Well, to *me* it looks like pattern number 7 in the Rorschach test for obsessive compulsive dissorder." But, then he got all depressed so I said, "Ok... it's a password prompt."
"putting ashes back together" can be surprisingly easy.
First off, if there are large enough pieces, then the information is often retained on the ash (I've read newspaper headlines quite clearly in fireplace ash), since the ink leaves a different residue than the paper.
However, I assume you had a high-efficiency incinerator. In that case, I would never bother trying. It's much easier to get a mole on the inside to memorize and repeat the contents of the documents before they are handed to those who burn it. Worse, you could even get someone who burns the documents to look at them for you!
There are a lot of ways to get information out of such a process, and in some cases even the volume of data arriving from which locations can be highly informative.
Slashdot Mirror
A crystalline structure is not quite the same as, say, a single strand of polymer, 200 miles long, and wound into a space-capable spherical hull.
There is nothing about Gnome or many other such software projects that could not have been done in South America, except for the fact that it usually just happens up north first
You've summed it up best right there. Stop, re-read that and you will get my point. I've said twice now that there's nothing special about the nations I'm pointing out as the hubs of the current technical world other than their current status as hubs of the technical world.
you are deeply misguided. The US/Mexico border is far less porous, from this perspective, than you imagine
You have no idea what I imagine, so keep your theories to yourself.
Miguel's education was in no sense a product of the proximity of the US
Up until the mid 90s, just being physically close to the US or a European country was a huge boon in terms of getting access to the Internet, or at least UUCP.
Did he have a PC? Was that more or less likely for being in a NAFTA nation? Guess which nation most of the tech in Mexico comes from?
Actually Miguel reads Slashdot from time to time, perhaps he'll stop by and weigh in. I personally don't think that if he had grown un in Brazil that Gnome would have happened, but there *are* some very impressive technologies that have come out of South America (look at the work done on the 2.4 Linux kernel), so it's not black-and-white.
I'm not trying to say that everyone else in the world is backwards, I'm just saying that there's an obvious technology gap, as represented on any chart of IP allocation, code contributions, machines per household, cross-border patent grants, etc, etc. These are not facts that are usually held in dispute....
The GP hulls were always my favorite Niven idea (though flash-crowds were pretty cool). The idea of a single-molecule macroscopic structure is just so freaky that I *want* to see one! :)
Nova recently had a great episode about IVF and other techniques. Some of it was actually kind of scary, like the tech in a fertility clinic who explained why multiple births are so common. His take was that it's all market pressure. If women look at the statistics for a fertility clinic, they will see that some percentage of all IVFs resulted in birth. Well, if you cram 5 viable eggs back in, instead of 2, you *are* more likely to get multiples, but you're also less likely to damage your success record in terms of viable implantations....
a lot of the tech on the web is built from non-US people.
Yes, but point out some tech that was developed outside of the G8 and their satelite nations (e.g. I count Mexico, Gnome's origin, as a US satelite and all of Europe as part of the UK/Germany/France triangle.
Nations like South Africa do contribute, but only in relatively small ways. Is that because they're stupid? Of course not! But the reality is that large technology infrastructures cost trillions of dollars to produce, and spending that kind of money requires some serious means and motivation. The US and Europe had both during the Cold War.
What I find interesting is Australia's contributions. I frankly don't understand why Australia is so technically literate. Not that it's bad, but I am curious what factors pushed them to develop their tech so much.
You are making the point that I made originally, and so I agree with you ;-) See my comments in this posting.
You are replying to a side-discussion on the specifics of copyright law WRT yanking a copyrighted document from a person who recieved it thinking that they were given the file by someone who had the right to do so, but then found out otherwise.
I've been corrected on the point, and am still awaiting confirmation from my lawyer. I would be very happy to be wrong, but I'm skeptical (as, I guess, I should be).
Thanks for the info, I'll take that back to my lawyer for review.
;-)
As for the GPL question goes, I agree that their continued distribution of Linux under the GPL should be sufficient for a judge to find against SCO. But it's much better, I think, to have a convincing case using several different arguments, not just one.
Well, hold up there a sec... The judge is going to rule on IBM vs SCO in terms of IBM's contract with USL (now owned by SCO). That case might go either way, depending on what the contract says, and we cannot know that. The fact that the code was GPLed by SCO is moot if SCO's contract with IBM says that IBM will keep this information as a trade secret, EVEN IN THE EVENT that IBM obtains it elsewhere. Remember that little worry about the SCO NDA having this rider? That's why people get worried about that kind of language.
Personally, I think IBM will win, but even if they lose, WE win because of the GPL and SCO's use of same.
As for having many arguments, I agree. I was only re-re-re-pointing out the fact that all of this is moot in the face of the GPL (for us, at least), because my comments could otherwise be interpreted as supporting SCO's arguments, which I feel are chiefly designed to mooch money from the open source community that helped build Caldera to the point that they could buy SCO. If anything they deserve to have every open source license include a new proviso: "these terms are granted to anyone who wishes to accept them, unless your company's name is three letters long and ends in S-C-O."
The greencard project was pretty fun, and I only worked on it briefly (no, I can't help you get one, I have no real ties to the folks that took over the project, and the project was run well so that "inside" information really didn't help you much -- everything I know that isn't useless serial driver crap, you can pretty much get by reading the press releases).
The really funny part for me was the requirement that the card needed to be durable enough to remain readable for up to 5 years, stored in the shoe of a migrant worker. QA on that has to suck
Users don't need a license to use copyrighted programs anymore than they need to pay a copyright fee before reading Gone with the Wind. If you copy, distribute, or modify copyrighted material, then you can be in copyright violation,
You're taking this out of context. It's one thing to have a legal copy of a work, and then use it in accordance with your fair use rights.
It's entirely another thing to retain a work that you recieved in an illegal transaction. The copyright owner does apparently have the right to confiscate the illegally copied work, and don't kid yourself into thinking that the authorities would not help them do so.
Again, a moot point in this case, as SCO has donated this software to the community by putting it under the GPL and distributing it ever since the beginning of this mess.
All requests come in on the same IP, they all leave on the same IP
Well, yes and no. One of F5's early claims to fame was their implementation of topographically unique inbound and outbound paths. Granted, the IP never changed, but "on the same IP" is ambiguous in your above statement.
but there's a bank of machines on the internal network serving the request. It's transparent to the end user...no www-16 prepended to the URL, unless you want it there
That's called load balancing, or address aggegation, or whatever your vendor of choice calls it. Every device that is capable of more than simple switching can do this, now.
Where in copyright law is there any requirement for people who have received infringing works to either destroy those works or compensate the rights holder for the infringement?
Not sure of the specifics really, but I consulted a lawyer who is well versed in intellectual property law as applied to software when AOL told people who downloaded Nullsoft's recent mistaken "release" that the software was put up for download without authorization.
My specific question was, "I know they can't revoke the GPL, but if the person who put it up was acting on his own, against company policy, then the GPL isn't being applied by someone with the right to do so, so what does that mean for the people who downloaded it? Do they have to destroy it as AOL requests?" The answer was "Yes."
His reasoning as he stated it to me was that they had a reasonable claim to innocence in the matter right up until AOL asked them to delete it. At that point, you can't keep it on the grounds that you didn't know it was given to you by someone who didn't have the rights to.
If you want to argue that logic, I suggest you do so with a lawyer, I'm just repeating what I was told.
It's more complex than you suggest. I think the best way to approach this is this: SCO has distributed, and continues to distribute Linux source on their public FTP server. Unless they can demonstrate SCO code that was put into the kernel after 2.4.13, then they can simply shut up and go away.
There may be code in 2.5 that was donated by IBM for multiprocessor locking. If that code is found to have been contributed in violation of IBM's contract with SCO, then 2.6 may have to be yanked. I will probably wait for hard data to come out of the courtroom before moving to 2.6, but that's not much of a hardship given that 2.6 isn't due to be released for quite some time.
They are saying that they will license your existing binary version of Linux. They will not grant you a source license, however.
This is perfectly legit. Only SCO's silly and rather toothless claims are bogus, the licensing idea is fine. Keep in mind that if SCO's claims were true, the GPL goes poof on Linux, and no one has a license to distribute. What's more, everyone would have to destroy their existing copies, since they got it in a manner that is legally equivalent to downloading a copyrighted song from Gnutella.
All SCO is saying is that THEY won't come after you for continuing to use Linux, if you pay them up front. It's a protection racket, but a legal one.
Still, pointless and ignorable. See my previous comments on why
Check out this posting from yesterday. You can download a GPLed copy of the Linux kernel from SCO, if you feel you need a license from them.
Problem solved, let's go back to writing code.
... by whom?
I really don't understand why you think that Linus is going to turn around and say, "you have no right to distribute SCO's code, stop or I'll sue."
It's not like you hurt Linus by doing so (he can create and distribute a SCO-free version, after all). It doesn't hurt Linux.
Now, if you try to use this as an EXCUSE to do something that the community would already be against (e.g. distributing a binary-only kernel), then I would not put it past Linus et al. to sue you for what they could have sued over without SCO's involvement. But that's a totally different issue, and has nothing to do with Red Hat shipping a source/binary version of Linux under the usual terms, that they got from Linus and then getting sued by Linus for it. I don't see that ever happening.
It's all moot anyway, since SCO is still shipping Linux source from their public Web site, under the terms of the GPL. *They* have put the code under the GPL, so while IBM and SCO can duke out their contractual dispute, the impact to the Linux community is that we get a lot of free press.
You're turning that inside out. Are you suggesting that Linus would sue Red Hat to get them to stop shipping the Linux kernel to their customers?! If not, then why would Red Hat's distribution of Linux to you be a problem? All SCO is saying is that if you pay them "protection" money, they won't sue you. That's really it.
On thier site, the timestamp on the SRPM file was 5/9/03 17:51:00
Ammusingly enough, the first entry in the changelog is:Also from the spec file. Heh, fixing an IBM RAID driver... oh, their prophetic souls.
Inside the SRPM, I do not see anything that could indicate that SCO does not wish to distribute this code under the terms of the GPL. As such, I believe that I am now the owner of a SCO-issued license to use, distribute and modify Linux source code as of version 2.4.13 (the entire tar-file for that version is contained in SRPM as a discrete and separarable file which also contains a copy of the GPL).
If you area a lawyer, and you read this, please speak up. I would like to know what my rights are here and to what extent I can re-distribute and modify this work in accordance with its stated license.
SCO is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They continue to support thier Linux customers with distributions of source code licensed under the GPL while saying that no one but they have the right to do so (staunchly ignoring the terms of their own licensing of the Linux soruce code). My head is spinning. Clearly there is a deck involved here, and it's not quite full. Is it mine?
Interesting. Someone else had said that it was gone. I'm downloading that now to see if it mentions anything (if it's just a huge README file that says, "UnixWare rocks, Linux sucks" over and over).
But even if SCO owned bits and pieces of the current Linux kernel, the result would simply be that nobody could redistribute Linux anymore until SCO's pieces are removed
Well, no not really. If you receive a copyrighted work from a source that did not have the right to license it to you, you can claim that you didn't know. That means that you can't be sued for copyright violation (assuming that no one can prove you're lying). But you *are* required to "give it back" (in the case of software or other electronic works, that means deleting and sending back the media). It's not *your* distribution of it that is at question, it is *your vendor's* distribution to you. If that was not legit, then you cannot reasonably use the software.
What SCO is saying (again, I'm not saying they're the good guys here) is that they will write you a license that says they won't come after *you* for failing to remove Linux (and thus their code) from your systems.
Problems with SCO's claim are well documented, and I cannot imagine that they intend to win this, but they have every right to issue a license for their own work (if it is) and it would mean exactly what they claim it would mean in that case.
You can't go check the GPL for confirmation of this. If SCO is right, and the code is not IBM's to have contributed, then indeed, it was not Linus' to distribute, nor SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, etc. That means that the GPL goes poof!, and no one but SCO's licensees can continue to *use* (not just distribute) this code, unless they got it from SCO.
The catch (again, well documented elsewhere) is that we *all* got the code from SCO when they distributed it under the GPL for 2 months after they started this whole thing. When all is said and done, Linux code that SCO has claim over (if any) was put under the GPL by SCO *after* their claim was issued and made available from their FTP servers. They have no right to sue anyone on the basis of not having a license (though they could sue someone on the basis of violating the GPL, if they had).
SCO is in for a world of hurt when the law suits come flowing in. Everything sits on IBM for the first step. SCO's only hope is that IBM settles, in which case all of the parties that are waiting to sue SCO would be at square zero in terms of having to demonstrate the facts. That would help SCO a bit, but I still think at least SCO stockholders will sue.
correction to my text: "by *not* offering source"
"now" was a typo.
No you mis-read. They're offering a license for the binary, not the binary. If they do, in fact, offer the binary itself, then they are violating the GPL by now also distributing source.
;-)
If, on the other hand they say, "your existing license is invalid, here have another." Then they are in the right. They cannot license the GPLed pieces, but that's fine. You can demonstrate that you received those pieces under the GPL.
It's an ugly use of the GPL, and companies like Red Hat will be 100% screwed by this.
That's ok, though, because the current odds on SCO winning this case are somewhere around the odds of the Red Sox winning the Superbowl right after the Triple Crown
Repeat after me: You can't distribute Linux for 2 months under the GPL *after* claiming it contains your code, and *then* remove it from distribution. It's out there. It's GPLed. They're done. All they have left is a contractual dispute with IBM that affects no one by IBM and SCO.
Oh, and by the way IBM is likely to win that one too.
Congratulations -- you've missed my point completely!
No, I didn't, but your answer indicates that you missed mine. Rather than just asserting that blindly, though, let me point out WHERE you missed it:
If any developer is concerned that the LGPL license requires them to Open Source their code that links my API, I'll tell them I don't read things that way
That was YOUR original comment, to which I was replying. Note that you were talking about a concern that is not actually part of this discussion (your code becoming open source). Thus, I pointed out that fact, while introducing some other information which you have ignored. The concern is that one's code becomes a derived work, governed by the terms of the LGPL. What's worse, you are often not the licensor, so your take on the license doesn't really matter. Most times, the licensor is a third party who might not read the license the way you do, and might well sue on the basis of that license.
Your interpretation then goes out the window, because it's really only useful in terms of throwing in your face and saying "then, why did you sue". There's no other legal weight to it, since you are not a party to this agreement, except in the sense that your license restricted the option in terms of license selection, of the sub-licensor. Had your license said, "and you agree not to sue on the basis of any interpretation of this license, other than the original author's, then you would have some say. But you did not.
I welcome a discussion on these topics, but unfounded sarcasm doesn't work well on me.
They're hardly going to take you to court over something like this. This only ever happens when they interpret the license as being _less_ restrictive
Agreed, but woefully, the licensor being sued isn't really the concern here, it's how many people will never use your software because they fear the license.
So, this interviewer asked me to look at a picture and tell him what I saw. I told him it was too embarasing....
;-]
He said, "No, it's ok. Everyone sees something different."
So I told him, "Well, to *me* it looks like pattern number 7 in the Rorschach test for obsessive compulsive dissorder." But, then he got all depressed so I said, "Ok... it's a password prompt."
[with appologies to Emo
"putting ashes back together" can be surprisingly easy.
First off, if there are large enough pieces, then the information is often retained on the ash (I've read newspaper headlines quite clearly in fireplace ash), since the ink leaves a different residue than the paper.
However, I assume you had a high-efficiency incinerator. In that case, I would never bother trying. It's much easier to get a mole on the inside to memorize and repeat the contents of the documents before they are handed to those who burn it. Worse, you could even get someone who burns the documents to look at them for you!
There are a lot of ways to get information out of such a process, and in some cases even the volume of data arriving from which locations can be highly informative.