Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 23, 2002 02:43 PM
You can't have it both ways when you denounced Gate's stance of "GPL as a cancer" as pure FUD and then condoned what Lindows (and other companies) have done. You can't dismiss "GPL is not a viable business model" as pure FUD and then condone GPL violations as "let's give Lindows a chance to succeed". If the only way to make money off the GPL license is to violate the GPL license itself, then the GPL license itself is not a viable business model.
Last month, IBM's Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer (he ported linux to S/390) was interviewed by a Scandinavian linux users group.
www.sslug.dk/patent/strassemeyer/transr-del.shtml
Dr. Strassemeyer recalled in the interview that in 1999, he had scheduled a meeting with Linus to show him a first viewing of linux on S/390. But before the meeting with Linus, the lawyers at IBM were all freaked out that such a demonstration to Linus was not vetted by the IBM lawyers.
After hundreds of IBM lawyers later, Dr. Strassemeyer was ONLY allowed to show Linus the demonstration "in an executive office, in an IBM lab, which was on IBM premises. And make sure that nobody took anything out so it wasn't a distribution."
Because the GPL lincense hasn't changed at all since 1999 and there has been no case law on the issue on the legality of GPL licensing to-date ---- the IBM legal opinion is still valid. What Lindows has done is clearly a distribution and thus must release the source code upon request.
This is the MAIN REASON why IBM does not and will never be a linux distributor --- it carries too much legal risk of contaminating their own proprietary IP. Actions speaks louder than words --- IBM knows "GPL is cancer" but it's smart enough not to say it aloud. And IBM is smart enough to spend most of that billion dollars on linux projects that aren't covered by GPL.
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You can't have it both ways.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 23, 2002 02:43 PMLast month, IBM's Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer (he ported linux to S/390) was interviewed by a Scandinavian linux users group.
www.sslug.dk/patent/strassemeyer/transr-del.shtml
Dr. Strassemeyer recalled in the interview that in 1999, he had scheduled a meeting with Linus to show him a first viewing of linux on S/390. But before the meeting with Linus, the lawyers at IBM were all freaked out that such a demonstration to Linus was not vetted by the IBM lawyers.
After hundreds of IBM lawyers later, Dr. Strassemeyer was ONLY allowed to show Linus the demonstration "in an executive office, in an IBM lab, which was on IBM premises. And make sure that nobody took anything out so it wasn't a distribution."
Because the GPL lincense hasn't changed at all since 1999 and there has been no case law on the issue on the legality of GPL licensing to-date ---- the IBM legal opinion is still valid. What Lindows has done is clearly a distribution and thus must release the source code upon request.
This is the MAIN REASON why IBM does not and will never be a linux distributor --- it carries too much legal risk of contaminating their own proprietary IP. Actions speaks louder than words --- IBM knows "GPL is cancer" but it's smart enough not to say it aloud. And IBM is smart enough to spend most of that billion dollars on linux projects that aren't covered by GPL.
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