List of software

Posted Aug 20, 2004 1:51 UTC (Fri) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link]

I've seen two schools of thought with regard to SCO and the GPL. The first school of thought maintains that public repudiation of the GPL is sufficient to revoke any privileges it grants you. SCO has certainly done that. They have said publically and in court that the GPL is unconstitutional, violates copyright law, is the same thing as public-domaining your code, and that they are exempt for their past activities because they were ignorant that they were improperly distributing their own trade secrets and copyrights. Fyodor of the nmap project has formally denied SCO distribution rights to nmap because their repeated public repudiations of the license.

The second school of thought says that shooting your mouth off (even in court) doesn't count for anything; only actions matter. As long as SCO upholds their obligations, like delivering source code to their customers or to any third party that receives binaries who's ultimate source is SCO then they are in the clear. The Samba project at least initially has taken this tack with them. As far as Samba is concerned, they're probably in the clear as far as actions are concerned. With regards to the Linux kernel, SCO is definitely in breach of the GPL. They are attempting to charge license fees to third parties. Even if SCO exclusive contributions to Linux give them some sort of right to charge others they were still recent distributers of other peoples' copyrighted material. SCO had no right to distribute that material in undisclosed linkage to their own. SCO would have had to rewrite what isn't theirs to distribute a kernel they would have no right to call "Linux". The parts that might be SCO's will not function without the parts they indisputably didn't write and have no claim whatsoever on. Those copyright holders can definitely go after them, as what IBM is doing now.

What is NOT being tested in court right now is the publically-repudiate-the-license theory of GPL violation. It may well have merit but IBM has enough concrete copyrights in Linux to grill them on the action theory which applies to most any sort of copyright. If there is anything left of SCO after IBM's onslaught, smaller Linux copyright holders will probably be embolded to pursue them with a juicy court precedent in hand. Come to think of it, the repudiate school depends exclusively on licensing legal theory while the action school is more grounded in copyright. I suspect action arguments are easier to make in court.

From my reading of user group mailing lists and other public forums, the action school of thought seems to be the most prevalent. I certainly haven't seen anyone else other than Fyodor step forward to revoke GPL license rights so I suspect the action school is most common among developers as well. Under either school of thought, SCO is well and truly boned. If the repudiate school has merit, they are in breach for EVERY piece of GPL software they have ever distributed. Under the action school, they are definitely in breach for the kernel at least. Both large and small pockets hold copyrights and can pursue them for this. I have this lovely mental picture of the lkml regulars feeding on SCO like pirahna.