[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 03:52:43PM -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> From: Amelia A Lewis [mailto:amyzing@talsever.com]
> >Should it be shown that there is SCO code in Linux, Linus and company will
> >remove it.
>
> Ok. It is a cost issue for the Linux users and their customers, and
> a risk to manage for companies to consider when enabling or allowing
> their employees to work on open source. They need to vette the
> project and the employees, so it is another cost item to add to
> participation in open source and a risk to be managed.
The kernel guys are pretty sure that if such tainted code exists, it's
really minimal. Technically removing and recoding such code area is likely
to be a matter of hours. Problem is that of course we need to know which
areas, if any. The code submission model is more based on personal
contributions than company submissions (except maybe for the drivers side)
and those people know how they wrote that code, and cut'n pasting from
a SYSV code base which have very different implementation principles and
architecture is really unlikely, it's just too different internally,
only drivers are sometime backported from one OS to another (usually resulting
in pretty horrible code, but I disgress ...)
Another viewpoint is that SCO which is actually the company Caldera
who made a Linux based IPO a few years ago (the real SCO company is now
called Tarentella IIRC and remarquably quiet on the issue !) have been
and continue to sell the Linux kernel under a GPL licence which as a side
effect waives that company any right to block redistribution of that code
under the same Licence.
IBM may be attacked for NDA violations, but I feel pretty confident that
unless Caldera-SCO want to publicly challenge the GPL (which seems funny for
them since their whole company business plan was built on it), they can
hardly attack Linux distributor for shipping under GPL the same bits what
they also shipped under GPL.
The community viewpoint is that Caldera never really managed to grasp
the community principles and build any mindshare which is quite primordial
for a totally open competition market like Linux distribution. The
ex-Caldera/SCO execs want to make cash from the cow carcass while there is
still some meat left attached to the bones, targetting IBM purse, how and
why is not such a big deal for the Linux community which feels quite confident
that in practice this can't affect them. Everybody is at work on the
first 2.6 beta stabilization release, which looks surprisingly stable
actually :-)
Of course I'm not a lawyer and my opinions are just that !
Daniel
--
Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard@redhat.com | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
|
