[NCLUG] SCO Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[jbass at dmsd.com]

	> and for some balance to the spiteful miss-information propaganda by the
	> Open Source community consider:
	>
	> 	http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31479.html

	That article is just plain silly.  It ignores several points of fact, 
	makes a patently false analogy to copying Harry Potter, and contains a 
	number of unsubstantiated allegations that seem to be almost designed 
	to inflame the Open Source community.  Its main virtue, I fear, is that 
	it has had the salutary effect of increasing traffic to the author's 
	website, which appears to be its primary goal.

	-=Eric

Not silly in the least, and the rants posted against it largely fail to
understand the difference between owning a copyright on a piece of code
that has restricted rights as virtue of being legally bound as a derivative
work.

The Potter example is NOT patently false, no matter how much the open source
community would like to be at this point. The entire issue of derivative
works is an absolutely critical point of law that makes copyright (and GPL)
have any value at all.

John