[NCLUG] What a winner of a case .... understanding copyright

[jbass at dmsd.com]

"J. Paul Reed" <preed at sigkill.com> writes:
> Given his history, let's hope he loses this frivilous suit, too.

Let's put this another way, let's assume that IBM is not held to
clean-room reverse engineering standards, thus greatly weakening
software copyrights to the point of effectively being non-enforcable
except for character for character, line for line, copies. Ditto
for HP, SGI, SUN ... etc.

Does anybody know of any current UNIX kernel vendor that is moving
to Linux that has properly issolated their UNIX teams and their
Linux teams to effect the clean-room mandate for code moved between
the environments? I don't.

That means that GPL is equally worthless as well, since firms can
sit down with GPL source, hand or machine restructure it, remove
the GPL copyright notices and call it their own as long as all the
labels and the gross visible attributes of the original code are
well hidden.

I believe strongly that open source will survive a judgement against
IBM for copyright violation and that everyone will behave in a much
more professional maner post judgement. So what if we have to roll
back to 2.2 or even 2.0 kernels and properly re-engineer forward?

The alternative of greatly weakening software copyrights, and GPL
in the process, is a horrible alternative to doing the right thing.

At least now, when firms contribute code bases to GPL, they know
their competitors are on equal footing ... without strong software
copyrights enforcing GPL, why contribute code to your competitor
so that he can easily incorporate (without accountability) and not
have to give back to the GPL source base?

I expect we might well see other variations of this before we are
done, maybe with data base vendors where ex-employees are dumping
the corporate jewels into open source?

John