Legal commentators weigh SCO's chances (Inquirer)

Posted Jul 29, 2003 17:18 UTC (Tue) by jdthood (subscriber, #4157) [Link]

I wonder when the third shoe will drop. SCO has made claims on the basis of contract law. They have made claims on the basis of copyright law. Where are the claims on the basis of patent law? They are surely coming, because patent law is the most dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the software proprietor. You don't have to sign a contract to be subject to patent restrictions. You don't have to copy anything to be subject to patent restrictions. You can live in a clean room and still violate them. The GPL is no defense against them. The independent software developer or the small company cannot really defend itself from a patent attack. Does SCO have any patents that they can threaten GNU/Linux users with? If they don't, Microsoft and Sun surely do. I suspect that this is what Bill Gates was, in his godfatherly way, referring to when he said that

     Over the next four or five years people will
     understand more about the intellectual property
     issues around open source software and Linux
     and that will address the open ended liability
     without indemnification for customers. There
     is going to be some friction around that side
     of the system.

RMS and Bruce Perens and others have been warning us about the threat of software patents for years. I once heard one of them say that the only reason the GNU/Linux community hasn't been threatened with software patents yet is that Microsoft et al. are waiting for patent legislation to pass in Europe. Once the legislation is in place, it will be safe for them to start using it to hammer people, even if this creates some bad publicity. That theory is plausible. The legislation was supposed to pass this month but it has been delayed until September. Perhaps that is when we see what Bill Gates means by 'friction'.

Posted Jul 29, 2003 19:08 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Software patents are going to kill Linux, and we're going to sit back and watch.

The problem is that even Lawrence Bloody Lessing has come out and said that intellectual property and "free culture" issues are not voting issues, not the issues on which you decide which candidate to vote for, not in 2004. If a leading light of the Good Cause says that, you'd better believe nobody else is going to have the stomach to do it.

Most of the country doesn't know or doesn't care. They have no clue that these sorts of things could affect *them*; it's one reaon to support the copyright-violating filesharers, simply because they might make up a sizeable voting bloc.

But even amongst those of us who know and care, who understand the issues, we aren't going to vote for politicians based on their intellectual property stances. We're going to vote for the Democrat or the Republican, based on in which party we were brought up, and we're going to justify it based on all our other positions and tell ourselves that intellectual property isn't as important as all those other things.

I mean, hell, if even those of us who care won't cross party lines or won't make it a make-or-break point to vote for legislators with half a clue on intellectual property issues, how are we ever going to reduce copyright terms? How are we going to stop ever-more-restrictive legislation about intellectual proprety? How are we going to forstall the coming software patent disaster? We aren't. Most voters don't know, those who do know aren't giving it the attention it needs, and meanwhile politicians do only what is in their best interest-- vote the way the big campaign donors want. The MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft can afford to throw a little cash at the politicians, who *won't even suffer* for voting with the companies, since none of us have the backbone to vote against them for their bad positions on this issue.

If you care, you need to consider voting for a politician in the "wrong" party, or a politician with the "wrong" opinion on Iraq, gun control, abortion, health care, or tax breaks, if that politician has the *right* view on intellectual property. If *we* aren't willing to do that, if we aren't willing to do all we can to help politicians who do that, you can be damn well sure that nobody else will, since nobody else even realizes it's an issue.

We might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride as the very core of free software is gutted in the name of "protecting intellectual property", "the rights of companies", and "investing in the economy".

Please consider making intellectual freedom a make-or-break voting issue in 2004. By 2008, it may well be too late for free and open source software.

-Rob

Posted Jul 29, 2003 22:21 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

There is nothing really terrible...

I have a business that depends in large part of Linux, but i never sold a piece of "software", because i couldnt in a sense, and i wouldnt...
Even when i make a CD of publicly available software, i charge for the service , not the software, and to me and the users what counts is:
(from http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/)

"Here's the part MS doesn't get about the GPL. It provides companies with superior indemnification compared with any proprietary product. Anyone who receives GPL'd software, no matter how they got it, as binary, as source, both, or even if they just tripped over a CD of it on the street and took it home, has the following rights under the GPL:

"Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
"The freedom to run the program, for any purpose...".
"The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs..."
"The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor..."
"The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits..."
"A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere . Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission."

Those four freedoms are your indemnification.

Now, IF THERE WERE EVER A VALID COPYRIGHT OR PATENT INFRINGEMENT CLAIM nothing can protect you from that. You must deal with the problem and excise any offending code, which is what the community has been asking SCO to make possible..."

1- If M$ sends me a letter about copyrights or patents i politly tell them to shove it,... even if i were an active developer!!(i cut off the code)

2- And in a more rebel sense, i belive the community only depends on itself with or without patents in europe, because there isnt no owner of ideas, and there's more than one way to do the same things.... but if things get to the nazi proportion and FLOSS get ilegal, only depends to the community to continue without a commercial frontend, and prevent that way the enormous FLOSS code database to be owned by Greedy Little Fingers

Posted Jul 30, 2003 2:27 UTC (Wed) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

Even those sometimes obstreperous KDE and Gnome desktop groups recently seem to have stayed closer to their respective knitting. There seems to be a generally pervasive understanding that such petty squabbles can wait.

When will journalists quit inventing this almighty GNOME vs KDE crusade? Where do they get this stuff? Who are these "desktop groups" that are at each other's throats? The only "GNOME vs KDE" rhetoric I've ever heard is from fanboys - you know, those guys who have nothing better to do than come up with reasons "my ____ is better than your ____". As far as I can tell, serious users / developers never got around to joining the holy war.