[PLUG] The latest on SCO vs. reality
Jeff Schwaber
jschwaber at wesleyan.edu
Thu May 22 14:47:01 UTC 2003
On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 16:32, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 May 2003, Rich Shepard wrote:
> > Then they claimed to find hunks of orthodox UNIX code leveraged
> > into Linux somehow, though at this writing they still haven't offered
> > the evidence. Unwilling to sue themselves, they "suspended" their
> > Linux business and warned Linux users about the "potential liability
> > that could rest with them for using such software" while offering to
> > "hold harmless" their own remaining Linux customers.
>
> It seems to me that if SCO owns the patents and copyrights it claims are
> implemented or copied in Linux code that the Linux distribution they
> created would be de facto licensing of those copyrights and patents under
> the GPL.
>
> I know that if _I_ release code under the GPL that contains patents or
> copyrights that I own, I can't go around suing people who create or
> distribute derivitave work based on my patented or copyrighted code.
>
> How is that not grounds for immediate dismissal of this suit?
>
> J.
let's imagine, for a moment, that I wrote a linux driver for a piece of
hardware, and I released the binary under a free-to-distribute, but no
source, license.
Now, let's imagine, that in a moment of drunken buffoonery, I gave away
access to my machine to, oh, _you_.
Now, you can grab the source of my code, which I stupidly left in a
world-readable home directory, and distribute it.
We're all agreed that that's not legal, right?
So then let's imagine I didn't know about this totally illegal thing,
even though it made Slashdot and this mailing list and whatever, and I
decided I wanted to make a Bigger Better Linux Distribution whose big
goal was going to be how good the hardware support was.
So I went and got all the big distributions, and put together all their
drivers, and made it into a distribution, and sold it/gave it away
(under the gpl).
Whoops! Wait a minute! My driver was in there.
Under your statement, it's now GPL'd, and the fact that I didn't
actually gpl it, I just included a previously gpl'd copy in my
distribution, is irrelevant.
I dearly hope that's not what the law says, because if it is, EVERY
business in the world is going to hate and fear the gpl.
If SCO's lawsuit is shot down, it should, nay must be shot down because
they don't have the evidence to prove infringement. If IBM took UNIX
code and put it in Linux, they had better lose and they had better pay.
Software has gotten too big and too complex for it to be easy to keep
track of everything that went into it, especially something like a
distribution. It will be too easy for some programmer to grab a GPL'd
piece of code and use it in his code, assuming that since the final
project will be GPL it's okay. One of those programmers is going to
realize a week later that the code he just released to the world wasn't
GPL'd by its owners.
And that's the real trick: The argument you use says that somebody else
can GPL your code.
Jeff
More information about the PLUG
mailing list