Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 8, 2023 11:43 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules by NYKevin
Parent article: Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

> You can't just do that. The US gives you three years from the date of the infringement to file a (civil) suit, and most other jurisdictions have similar statutes of limitations (although they may not all be exactly the same length). See 17 USC 507.[1]

Thanks for that, but for purposes of my own understanding, how is this current scenario materially different from the delays from initial infringement-to-enforcement in SCO v IBM (which I think is _still_ not quite technically over) and more recently, Oracle v Google? Ultimately both were more about ongoing infringement, no?

The SCO debacle in particular is where the Linux kernel's Developer Certificate of Origin came from, and I think it's safe to state that, regardless of any technical/stylistic/etc issues, there's no way [Open]ZFS would ever get accepted into the mainline without "signed-off-by: legal@oragle.com" or shipping [Open]ZFS binaries as part of OracleLinux.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 8, 2023 14:53 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Thanks for that, but for purposes of my own understanding, how is this current scenario materially different from the delays from initial infringement-to-enforcement in SCO v IBM (which I think is _still_ not quite technically over) and more recently, Oracle v Google? Ultimately both were more about ongoing infringement, no?

Firstly, it's very easy to sue in the US even when you have no case.

Secondly, certainly in the SCOG case we think the initial aim was to get IBM to buy them off, and then (for SCOG) it turned into an existential fight for survival plus a fraud to milk the company. So they were simply prolonging the case any which way they could.

And then, when you really have a case, it gets summarily dismissed (WP vs MS) - based on a mis-direction by a Judge I believe. WordPerfect thought that the statute of limitations had been stayed by Netscape vs MS, only to discover when they tried to litigate using Netscape as precedent, that it hadn't and they were out of time. I think what they *should* have done was launch the suit and at the same time ask the Judge to stay the case until NS vs MS was over. But either counsel misled them, or they mis-understood counsel.

Cheers,
Wol