Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week) [LWN.net]

Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)

Posted Sep 8, 2004 14:01 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week) by petegn
Parent article: Co-Op Puts A New Twist On Open Source (Information Week)

`Defrauded'?

I don't think we can stop them writing their own code and keeping it private to their little clique. It's not as though they're taking Linux kernel code or GNU grep or something and using it in there: and even if they were, the individual actors involved are free to not distribute their modifications beyond the boundaries of their little clique: they just have no recourse in copyright law to stop their individual members from handing those mods out to all comers.

(They might try to stop it with a separate contract among their members: I'm not sure if that would be considered GPL violation, and certainly they could not use that weapon against third parties to whom the GPLed code was redistributed by one of their members, only against the member doing the redistributing. I seem to recall that there was a bit of a flap when Caldera tried to release a beta under similar terms: but the part of Red Hat that used to be Cygnus frequently enters into contracts with providers of cash when porting GCC that lead to changes staying out of the main GCC tree for an agreed period of time, and nobody calls that GPL violation. This is a murky area.)

The only objectionable thing is that this bunch call what they're doing `open source', which is wrong by any measure (what they describe is even less `open' than `open systems').

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