Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos alleges that the IBM and Red Hat conspiracy has harmed the open-source community and specifically Xinuos’ OpenServer 10 product, which is based on FreeBSD, an open-source UNIX-based operating system and alternative to Red Hat’s Linux-based open-source operating system, RHEL. 'By dominating the Unix/Linux server operating system market, competing open-source operating systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market.'" The full text of the suit [PDF] is available for those wanting the details.
Posted Apr 1, 2021 2:30 UTC (Thu)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link]
Posted Apr 1, 2021 3:17 UTC (Thu)
by andyc (subscriber, #1130)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 7:19 UTC (Thu)
by pdewacht (subscriber, #47633)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 3:52 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 6:40 UTC (Thu)
by suckfish (guest, #69919)
[Link] (1 responses)
Is this lawsuit serious, or have they simply hoping that they've set their sights low enough that they'll get paid to go away even by people who have proven that they'll bear the cost of standing up for their principles?
Posted Apr 1, 2021 13:21 UTC (Thu)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
If the SCO-IBM lawsuit has taught us one thing it is that IBM doesn't pay a plaintiff to “go away”. They leave a smoking crater where the plaintiff used to be. To them it's a matter of not creating a precedent that would encourage others to try the same tactic on them, and they have pockets that are deep enough to litigate this until the Second Coming if necessary.
If this goes forward it will probably play out just like the other lawsuit: The court will ask Xinuos to come up with actual evidence (such as the lines of code that were allegedly copied into Linux from Project Monterey via AIX), and the plaintiff will hem and haw for a while before the whole thing is stopped by a summary judgement. It won't go anywhere near a jury. If anything, IBM and Red Hat are better placed to defend themselves now than they used to be in the 2000s, because the provenance of code in Linux is much better documented and easier to look into than it was. (And we don't even need Groklaw to figure this out for us.)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 13:08 UTC (Thu)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
This one is so lame that Groklaw can stay where it is. It will keep a bunch of lawyers and a judge busy for a while but isn't likely to result in the big payout that Xinuos seems to be hoping for.
If you file your lawsuit on 31 March and the first thing that happens is that people wonder if it's an early April Fool's joke, that should tell you something already right there.
Posted Apr 1, 2021 4:16 UTC (Thu)
by atai (subscriber, #10977)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 4:27 UTC (Thu)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
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Posted Apr 4, 2021 2:43 UTC (Sun)
by kmeyer (subscriber, #50720)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 5:23 UTC (Thu)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
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Posted Apr 2, 2021 1:23 UTC (Fri)
by ErikF (subscriber, #118131)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 6:12 UTC (Thu)
by wzzrd (guest, #12309)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 6:57 UTC (Thu)
by johill (subscriber, #25196)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 10:01 UTC (Thu)
by arnd (subscriber, #8866)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 11:40 UTC (Thu)
by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
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Posted Apr 2, 2021 2:34 UTC (Fri)
by willy (subscriber, #9762)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 9:32 UTC (Thu)
by edeloget (subscriber, #88392)
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> 134. Given all of these significant, commercially valuable features, OpenServer 10
Guys are looking at IBM/Redhat promotion material that promots Linux for IBM cloud, conflate this with an abuse of power. A simple yet non exhasutive look to their cloud offer shows that Red Hat is not even the default choice for their virtual servers (it's CentOS, out of 5 possibilities : CentOS, Debian, RedHat, Windows, Ubuntu ; it's also possible to use Suse if I understand that maze of choices correctly).
"Good luck" to them.
Posted Apr 1, 2021 9:57 UTC (Thu)
by jafd (subscriber, #129642)
[Link] (7 responses)
Otherwise, were it not for the lawsuit and the news piece here, I reckon I would keep on being blissfully ignorant of Xinuos’ existence, as would many others.
Posted Apr 1, 2021 11:35 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 20:36 UTC (Thu)
by jafd (subscriber, #129642)
[Link] (4 responses)
Ah, those guys. And now they are suing IBM and Red Hat for the chutzpah Red Hat and IBM had by advertising the products of, surprised gasp, Red Hat and IBM, and not OpenServer or whatever else there is! This would totally work! Either the lawyers who compose such lawsuits should belong to the loony bin, or the judicial system in which such lawsuits have even a flying chance should.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 1:14 UTC (Fri)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (3 responses)
The company deserves the majority of the blame for this. Behind every sleazy lawyer, there's a sleazy client*. That's not to say the lawyers deserve to be absolved; they didn't have to take the case. But the primary blame should be on the client who initiated the suit. And it's not at all clear this suit has any real chance. Anyone file a suit over just about anything, and it takes the legal system a little while to throw out even the most obviously frivolous of suits. I don't expect this suit to stick around nearly as long as the original SCO suit.
*OK, maybe not quite every sleazy lawyer. Occasionally a sleazy lawyer will start with an idea for a lawsuit and then hunt for a client to justify it, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 15:08 UTC (Fri)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link] (2 responses)
"Update: Microsoft behind $50M SCO investment"
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2563673/update--mic...
Microsoft -> Fund -> Client -> Lawyer -> Lawsuit
Posted Apr 2, 2021 16:08 UTC (Fri)
by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
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Posted Apr 2, 2021 18:20 UTC (Fri)
by jzb (editor, #7867)
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Posted Apr 9, 2021 7:26 UTC (Fri)
by jimbo (subscriber, #6689)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 12:24 UTC (Thu)
by JMB (guest, #74439)
[Link] (14 responses)
Posted Apr 1, 2021 12:48 UTC (Thu)
by mgk (guest, #74833)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Apr 2, 2021 0:07 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Cheers,
Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:05 UTC (Fri)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
Also, according to the Wikipedia article, their FreeBSD OpenServer is based on FreeBSD 10, and their last releases were in 2018.
Posted Apr 4, 2021 2:47 UTC (Sun)
by kmeyer (subscriber, #50720)
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Posted Apr 1, 2021 14:56 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (6 responses)
I have no idea if you're implying that LLVM is stolen (it's not), or that corporations can extend LLVM and that this constitutes theft (it doesn't, and wouldn't even if copyright violation was involved, which it isn't) or if you're suggesting something else, but this doesn't make me want to try to plough through the rest of your badly-formatted comment: it's too likely to be a morass of evidence-free conspiracy-theorizing.
(Your belief that RH has something to do with the whole RMS kerfuffle is just more evidence. The timing makes it perfectly clear that they just followed the wave of revulsion because they're not complete idiots.)
Posted Apr 2, 2021 8:03 UTC (Fri)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (5 responses)
Concerning "stealing", do you complain when proprietary software companies call copyright violations "stealing"? Apparently JMB considers it "stealing" when a company takes free software and uses it in a proprietary product. I have seen complaints in a similar vein by advocates of permissive licenses when software under such a license was integrated in software released under a copyleft license.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 10:04 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's worth noting that at one point, Apple was actively looking at integrating LLVM with GCC under the GPLv2: Chris Lattner even e-mailed about it back in 2005 from his Apple e-mail. That work was rejected, in part for political reasons, and arguably is part of the back story to why Apple dislikes the GPL.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:19 UTC (Fri)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
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It's quite clear from Apple's behavior -- although they've made no public statement -- that they dislike the GPLv3 _specifically_.
They were -- and are -- willing to ship GPLv2 code, but not a single smidgen of GPLv3. The mass relicensing was the immediate turning point at which they ceased updating all GNU software on their systems, and started rewriting or otherwise finding alternatives to everything.
The integration of LLVM and GCC being rejected/ignored is a much too low level technical issue to cause such a major direction change. I suspect that he only way in which these are related is that the integration proposal likely stopped being persued from Apple's side soon after being posted, as they realized the implications of GPLv3 (the first draft of which was released a couple months after this proposal!).
One might wonder what would've happened if they had successfully contributed llvm to FSF/GCC a year earlier, and it, too, had been relicensed to GPLv3...
Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:26 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:28 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Yes, because it's not theft, it's a completely different legal category with different implications, different penalties, etc etc etc. As the FSF has long noted, calling it "theft" is pure propaganda on behalf of the beneficiaries of a set of state-backed quasi-monopolies (proprietary software companies and other restrictive copyright owners).
Property laws are millennia older than copyright laws and not related to them.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 18:24 UTC (Fri)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
That is how the GPL is supposed to work: It imposes a tax on proprietary hardware and software, by forcing the developer to avoid using GPL'd code. Apple decided to pay that tax. Is that wrong?
Now, the permissively-licensed alternative turning into a serious competitor to the GPL-licensed software is probably *not* what the FSF wanted, but "not having the outcome the FSF wanted" is a far cry from "evil." If the GNU people want GCC to win, then they need to actually make it a superior product. Ironically, LLVM's fully reusable IR is (or at least has been) a major product differentiator, to GCC's detriment.
Posted Apr 1, 2021 15:43 UTC (Thu)
by johannbg (guest, #65743)
[Link]
Maybe this is some kind of April Fool's Day comment or wishful thinking but you truly should not be giving the year of the Linux desktop people some false hopes since realistically speaking the Linux desktop market share is somewhere close to 2% not 30% and with people moving towards Apple not Linux from the looks of it [1].
1. https://www.t4.ai/industry/desktop-operating-system-marke...
Posted Apr 2, 2021 22:16 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (1 responses)
It is GCC that would not exist if not for looting the commons of EGCS and LLVM. LLVM has always used a GPL-compatible license, and perhaps that was in error.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 22:30 UTC (Fri)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
Per Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGC... ):
"While both projects followed each others changes closely, EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, blessed EGCS as the official version of GCC, and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999 the two projects were once again united."
Posted Apr 1, 2021 21:18 UTC (Thu)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Apr 2, 2021 22:24 UTC (Fri)
by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417)
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Their press releases page is interesting too https://www.xinuos.com/press-news/
Posted Apr 4, 2021 4:26 UTC (Sun)
by freebird (guest, #43129)
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Posted Apr 4, 2021 15:06 UTC (Sun)
by yoduh (subscriber, #38527)
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Posted Apr 5, 2021 18:05 UTC (Mon)
by jhhaller (guest, #56103)
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Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Is the original lawsuit even concluded? According to Wikipedia's timeline, it was still ongoing in 2018.
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Is this lawsuit serious, or have they simply hoping that they've set their sights low enough that they'll get paid to go away even by people who have proven that they'll bear the cost of standing up for their principles?
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Moreover, the filing was at an actual court, with actual lawyers. Still, half the internet seems to assume it's a joke. For instance, the (usually) reliable Heise website included an article on the lawsuit in their list of the best hoaxes for this year.
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
> would have brought great consumer benefits. Yet, here, Xinuos and its FreeBSD-based product
> are being specifically targeted to prevent introduction into that ecosystem"
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Either the lawyers who compose such lawsuits should belong to the loony bin, or the judicial system in which such lawsuits have even a flying chance should.
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
XinuosXinuos sues IBM
cf: sinous, ophidian, snakelike
Xinuos sues IBM
The timing is interesting - RedHat/IBM and development groups affiliated to them press out RMS from FSF - and do everything to stop his return.
Yesterday there was a short note: Canonical Releases "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview".
SCO was interesting - and so was the Oracle - Google affair ...
We should all wake up - as kernel hackers already said - this is a world of monopolies - and all think that there is only one - and work hard for that goal. And when their rights are to be limited, they are in need of rivals - M$ took GNU/Linux back then, Apple took Google - and when they saw it was too much of a rival, Apple used connections to Oracle to stop them - on the legal front, of cause. Technically Apple was always inferior and are to that date.
LLVM would not exist if GCC would not be using GPL - a monopoly must embrace and extend - must steal code and make it their own and stop other to use similar code.
So what had we learnt from SCO: Sun backed SCO, and Sun got payment from M$ and after that was non existent. Similar to M$ payment for DEC for stealing the NT code from them incl. hiring former developers who was pressed to bring the entire source code (well, I don't have to say anything about copyright message of another company in MS DOS - do I?).
Linux market share on the desktop is 30 percent so we don't have to worry - oh wait, it is ... only a tiny fraction.
Why? Schools are using Windows ... instead having to pay big license fees - biggest companies are using Windows (nearly for free with their CEOs sitting in the other ones supervisory board - you now - this is not bribery ;) ... so smaller ones have to pay full priced licenses to work with the big ones. Can anybody deny that?
Having been more than 10 years in IT business I had really seen enough of that going on.
This suit is technically non existent - we seem all to agree - but the question is who is pulling the strings.
Free and Open Source SW was never in so much danger - and never saw so much wrong decision and stupid behavior like today.
No, I am not in search of popcorn ... if the spirit of free software "to enable the user" ... is lost, we all have lost.
And currently it does not seem that there is even a fight against that progressive loss happening anymore.
Everything is misused for their goal - even Corona is now a force for putting everything behind digital learning.
It is just stupid - every scientist knows it - studies prove it - but this if forced non the less - there is money to earn. Or the Corona App - as the perfect surveillance device. And the necessary data for a rough probability of being infexted can not be concluded from the available data (who uses a mask in that very moment - is there glass between them - are they shouting ... an endless list of missing important factors).
And which percentage of the world population is able to understand those details - the Internet is harmful and not helpful here ...
Maybe some brilliant people should think about the situation - and work for a change.
And one should stop "GPLx and higher" as that higher version may no longer be a free license at all.
So chose GPL2 or GPL3 - what ever suits your willing as author best if you want to use the GPL.
Who would have seen that all comming ... ?
So SCO was the beginning - not the end of misusing ill legal situations.
And yes - good journalism is rare to find - so calling for Groklaw may be one of the first thoughts of all of us ...
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Wol
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Apple probably would not have financed LLVM if GCC was under a permissive license (i.e., amenable to incorporation into a proprietary product); LLVM then might have suffered the usual fate of research projects. Apple's enmity to GPL is widely known. Conspiracy theory? I have experienced it personally: they wanted us to release Gforth under a different license.
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Serious Foolery here.
Xinuos sues IBM