[NCLUG] Organizing against SCO?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 06:40:19AM -0600, jbass at dmsd.com wrote:
>Interesting frame of reference. If you watch someone steal something
>that is critical to your business, is it stolen property when it leaves
>your business, or is it really only stolen property when/if the thief
>is finally sentenced? I believe US law generally agrees on the former,
>even in copyright violations.

I'm fairly sure that it's quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.
If you are missing your television set, and the police go to IBM's
local office and find a television of the same make/model/serial number,
that's one thing.  IP theft is a much more tricky issue.

The "example code" that they showed the guy in the linux journal article
you mention before said that he found substantially similar code from
many sources around the net, and didn't seem to think they were coming
from IBM or Linux.  RCU seems to have been developed by Sequent, now a
part of IBM, so the quesiton there is how is that algorithm encumbered.
Then you've got the fact that SCO was shipping the code under the GPL,
which changes the landscape further.

I'm suprised that you think it's as clear cut as if somone walked in and
took a computer as the owner watched.

>The open source movement in theory is supposed to foster a creative
>environment and innovative solutions to advance the state of the art.
>We all should be concerned and angry at the developers that take the
>short cut of using anothers non-GPL design as the basis for their own
>work.

If IBM is shown to be clearly wrong in this case, there's going to be
plenty of anger from the community to go around.

>One suggestion would be having a responsible open source developer group
>actively aid SCO in the indentification of rogue code, accellerate the
>discovery process to identify the individuals and organizations involved

SCOs NDA currently does a pretty good job of prohibiting that.  Anyone
doing so seems to have to agree never to touch the kernel again.  That's
an awfully high price to pay.  SCO doesn't seem to want that to happen

>Or, we can continue trying to make SCO the scape goat for others actions.

You seem pretty confident that IBM is clearly in the wrong here.  What
is it that has so convinced you?  You're one of the only people I know
who seems convinced that SCO was obviously wronged, and that IBM needs
to pay up, we need to abandon Linux because it's tainted IP, and either
switch to Hurd or BSD or something.

Remember, what SCO has been saying is that they don't want the code
taken out of Linux, because there's no real clear way to entirely remove
the tainting.  They seem to be saying that they're going to pursue
treating the entire kernel as if it's tainted and if they get their way
seem likely to cause the Linux kernel to be abandoned.  I suspect that
having to pay SCO to use Linux would cause Linux to just die.  And the
heavy kernel contributers will probably be tainted by that, so they
can't participate in a new kernel...

Sean
-- 
 Electronic ways to get in touch with Canadians?
 Don't they generally involve a moose and an antenna?
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin