The latest ReactOS newsletter is out. "Reactions have varied in regard to 0.3.1, though one response was consistent. The difficulty in getting it to work on real hardware. As mentioned many times, 0.3.1 was branched in the middle of a kernel rewrite."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-13
Copyleft software has been amazingly successful in the courtroom, even when the facts of the case are To Kill A Mockingbird-obvious. ReactOS probably doesn't have anything to worry about.
SCO's claim to date has amounted to 349 lines of code they claim was copied, with the majority of them consisting of comments and declarations; it's questionable whether those portions would even be covered by copyright law even if IBM admitted to copy-and-paste tactics.
Copyleft is successful specifically because of many of the practices behind it, such as clean-room reverse engineering or the absence of direct contact with copyright protected code. This can't be overlooked.
It would be a mistake for a paid proprietary developer to contribute work to a similar OSS project, or even if that developer has access to proprietary code and information as part of their daily job. Most high profile projects will tend to reject work under those circumstances, and even IBM and HP compartmentalize their OSS and proprietary software developers.
Remember that you can't copy something you don't have access to. With a project like ReactOS where the software is written from scratch or based on existing OSS code, it would be difficult for Microsoft to claim code was copied from or directly influenced by their own source code since they would have difficulty proving the developers ever saw Microsoft source code, which reduces their opposition tactics to the usual claims of baseless IP copying. That premise works because none of the developers actually has contact with Microsoft source code; if one of them does then the entire argument shifts potentially in Microsoft's favor.
Member since:2006-01-21
Could you please point out specific examples to which code SCO (arguably, see the Novell vs. SCO case) has the copyright for, that has been dumped verbatim into the Linux kernel (by IBM or whoever)?
Hint: The code examples presented at the SCO forum some years ago have been shot down within days (IIRC, BSD code and therefore legally transferable to Linux, please correct me if I'm wrong).
The SCO legal team has used a very fancy theory concerning "methods and concepts" and a very adventurous interpretation of how the copyright system works in order to dance around the "verbatim copying of code" issue lately and has went to great lengths to turn this into a contract related issue (Linux on Power, Project Montery).
If you know of any specific examples of source code with a (at least somehow verify able) non-clean provenance, please do the right thing:
- point it out to the (Linux/BSD/ReactOs/...) devs directly
- provide specific information why this code is problematic (e.g. infringes upon library xyz of OS version a.b) (and in the case of SCO)
- tell it also the SCO legal team, they look as if they could need some help in finding infringing code in the linux base
EDIT: As elsewhere pointed out correctly in the comment above mine, not every instance of "verbatim identiy" is automatically a copyright infringement, for example in the case of header files (where it is pretty much impossible to deviate from existing implementations, when compability is an issue) or implementations of trivial (sub)routines, copyright is almost likely not infringed.
Edited 2007-03-19 18:20
Member since:
2007-02-22
if so happens, the sco vs linux clown show will be a flea on the back of a elephant in comparison...
I dunno. In the case of SCO vs IBM, SCO has been able to show the SCO-owned code that was released verbatim by IBM under the GPL without SCO's permission, and they still haven't been able to recieve damages.
Copyleft software has been amazingly successful in the courtroom, even when the facts of the case are To Kill A Mockingbird-obvious. ReactOS probably doesn't have anything to worry about.