[NCLUG] Organizing against SCO?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:43:24AM -0600, jbass at dmsd.com wrote:
>One needs to do some homework here ... the claim appears for code that is found
>in current versions of the kernel, not just 2.5.  One ought to get familar with
>the claims and the concerns before ranting. In particular, quoting:

It's an imperfect world, John.  I'd love to have a perfect knowledge of
the law and legal system, SCOs claims and of what the source of the
questionable code is.

However, I don't think that wether it's 2.4 AND 2.5 versus only 2.5
significantly changes my "rant".  What do you expect, I'm going to say
"Oops, it was 2.4 as well as 2.5.  Clearly that gives SCO the right to
extort Linux users."?  :-)

>RMS's zeal to kill corporate IP, and his rantings, have failed to properly
>educate his followers in the legal madates as they follow his will to
>reverse engineer and replace all corporate IP with free open source.  There

Perhaps that is true, I don't know.  I seem to recall having to be
brought up to speed with IP issues before contributing code to Gnu
projects, but I don't specifically recall if they mentioned tainting.
It wouldn't impact me much because I don't really have any access to
tainted sorces.

So, this may be a real problem.  I'm not sure that it really matters in
my "rant" though...  The people being accused of tainting aren't
actually "RMS followers", they're IBM employees, and IBM should be
educating them on the matter as well as examining the source that's
getting released.  Considering how much effort it took to get Postfix
released from IBM, I'd be suprised if Linux contributions by people
simultaneously working on AIX would be very streamlined.

If it's true that IBM did that, then they deserve what they get.
However, the Linux community deserves the right to know about it and fix
IBM's mistake, and get on with it's business.

I can't imagine a judge giving SCO a judgement that would result in IBM
being penalized *AND* all Linux users having to pay SCO for the ability
to use Linux.  That seems to be what SCO is hoping for, but I can't see
that they have a legal leg to stand on.

They have a claim with IBM because IBM has access to AIX and Unix code
and an agreement about derivitive code and the IP.  I doubt SCO has
similar agreements that 1500 other companies are violating, yet they
sent them letters.  To me, those letters purpose was to spread fear
about Linux.

Sean
-- 
 "The phrase ``ship it!'' is one with long and deep resonances in my
 benighted and antiquated big-software-dept career." -- John Shipman, 1998
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin