The greening of Linux (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com talks with Martin Fink, HP's Linux VP. The conversation was dominated by HP's indemnification offer. "There was an extensive amount of due diligence. We took an analysis of the risk profile and said we were willing to accept that risk on behalf of our customers. If you look at what some of the others did, IBM and Red Hat countersued. But from a customer's perspective, that didn't solve the problem. The indemnity solved a real problem today."

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Eh, the real problem

Posted Dec 4, 2003 3:08 UTC (Thu) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (1 responses)

Indemnification makes the customer feel a little better today but it
does not fix the real problem. IBM had little choice but to fight in
court. My hat's off to Red Hat (pun intented) for doing the right thing
even with all this indemnification FUD flying around.

Eh, the real problem

Posted Dec 4, 2003 13:32 UTC (Thu) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link]

Really, this indemnification is a load of non-sense and if it was invoked by a
customer they might be lucky and get the initial cost of their software back but that's
about it.

The concept is nothing but a warm fuzzy for customers that do not take the time to
read the appropriate EULA's.

Redhat and IBM have done the right thing by not offering such bogus coverage.

Seems to me offering it throws some validity to SCO's non-sense, which at this
point AKAIK is exactly that... non-sense. The notion of a million plus lines of code in
the Linux kernel belonging to them and none of the developers not knowing it is
beyond the stretch of imagination.