Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 22:02 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by khim
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

> Why would there be such a clause if there were no violators?

But if there were no such clause, this is not a valid legal precedent, contrary to what you claim.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 22:29 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not that CD-ROM haven't included any retaliation clauses. It was commercial product and, as such, included proprietary installer and some proprietary programs. And if you copied that you were obvious copyright violator, plain and simple.

It haven't included retaliation clause for the case where you may copy only free software from it, but without installer it wasn't much useful.

IOW: it haven't needed any retaliation clauses because it just made the whole story with attempts to achieve bug-for-bug compatibility impossible.

Whether court would consider that “the same thing” as what RedHat is doing now is open question, but practically it was much easier and simpler way to achieve what RedHat is trying to achieve.

And then RedHat bought them and tried to eat their cake and have it too (pretend that they don't sell proprietary software and yet, someone, stop RHEL freeloaders).

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 3, 2023 9:50 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Of which SuSE is the perfect example.

YaST forbade distribution for money. It was easy (and perfectly okay) to copy a SuSE CD. You could give them away, you just couldn't sell them ...

Cheers,
Wol