Easier way to get a license [LWN.net]

Easier way to get a license

Posted Jul 21, 2003 19:01 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216)
In reply to: Easier way to get a license by lyda
Parent article: SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

Well, let's think about this another way: sco says people have been infringing since 2001, and their kernel srpm is 2.4.13, which is from Oct. 2001. If that's the last version they say is legal, then let's have a look at the changelog for 2.4.14:

final:
- David Miller: sparc/scsi scatterlist fixes
- Martin Mares: PCI ids, email address update
- David Miller: revert TCP hash optimizations that need more checking
- Ivan Kokshaysky/Richard Henderson: alpha update (atomic_dec_and_lock etc)
- Peter Anvin: cramfs/zisofs missing pieces

pre8:
- Andrea: fix races in do_wp_page, free_swap_and_cache
- me: clena up page dirty handling
- Tim Waugh: parport IRQ probing and documentation fixes
- Greg KH: USB updates
- Michael Warfield: computone driver update
- Randy Dunlap: add knowledge about some new io-apics
- Richard Henderson: alpha updates
- Trond Myklebust: make readdir xdr verify the reply packet
- Paul Mackerras: PPC update
- Jens Axboe: make cpqarray and cciss play nice with the request layer
- Massimo Dal Zotto: SMM driver for Dell Inspiron 8000
- Richard Gooch: devfs symlink deadlock fix
- Anton Altaparmakov: make NTFS compile on sparc

pre7:
- me: reinstate "delete swap cache on low swap" code
- David Miller: ksoftirqd startup race fix
- Hugh Dickins: make tmpfs free swap cache entries proactively

pre6:
- me: remember to bump the version number ;)
- Hugh Dickins: export "free_lru_page()" for modules
- Jeff Garzik: don't change nopage arguments, just make the last a dummy one
- David Miller: sparc and net updates (netfilter, VLAN etc)
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanups
- Jan Kara: quota initialization race
- Tigran Aivazian: make the x86 microcode update driver happy about
hyperthreaded P4's
- me: shrink dcache/icache more aggressively
- me: fix up oom-killer so that it actually works

pre5:
- Andrew Morton: remove stale UnlockPage
- me: swap cache page locking update

pre4:
- Mikael Pettersson: fix P4 boot with APIC enabled
- me: fix device queuing thinko, clean up VM locking

pre3:
- René Scharfe: random bugfix
- me: block device queuing low-water-marks, VM mapped tweaking.

pre2:
- Alan Cox: more merging
- Alexander Viro: block device module race fixes
- Richard Henderson: mmap for 32-bit alpha personality
- Jeff Garzik: 8139 and natsemi update

pre1:
- Michael Warfield: computone serial driver update
- Alexander Viro: cdrom module race fixes
- David Miller: Acenic driver fix
- Andrew Grover: ACPI update
- Kai Germaschewski: ISDN update
- Tim Waugh: parport update
- David Woodhouse: JFFS garbage collect sleep

Anybody see any possible infringements?

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Easier way to get a license

Posted Jul 21, 2003 20:55 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

I know they didn't say it explicitly--it's a synthesis: (a) They're still distributing 2.4.13 under GPL, (b) They say that people have been infringing since 2001, therefore, 2.4.13 seems to be the last version they aren't complaining about. They are very foggy in the extreme about their understanding of "Linux" in the first place--they can't seem to figure out the difference between the kernel and the aggregate collection of software in general--so the synthesis seemed as logical as anything else I can think of related to this psychotic case...

Easier way to get a license

Posted Jul 23, 2003 19:49 UTC (Wed) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

Right, and they never do.
That sorta sits at the core
of the whole thing, doesn't
it?

Occam's razor applies here.