The convoluted case of SCO v. Novell dealt a heady blow to the SCO Group Wednesday, with United States District Judge Dale Kimball ordering the company to pay $2.5 million to Novell for improperly claiming, and collecting royalties for, the Unix operating system.
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Member since:2005-07-07
Actually I believe I'm more of a moderate as far as software licensing politics goes. Here is my view:
Operating systems:
In general I believe these should be under the GNU GPL or similar licensing with exceptions for linking system calls into proprietary programs in order to prevent one company monopolies that can dictate to other software and computer manufacturers on what their products should be like Microsoft does. (This is why Linux is my favorite OS.)
GUI, TUI, Game Programming and other programming libraries:
These should be under GNU LGPL, BSD or MIT style licensing or in the Public Domain to allow their use in both F/OSS and proprietary software on equal terms. (My favorite ones here as far as licensing goes are wxWidgets, FLTK, GTK, SDL, ncurses and the fox toolkit,)
Applications:
My view is that application level software can be either proprietary or F/OSS at the determination of the developer as long as it uses open standards for the documents it saves to prevent Microsoft style dictatorship.
So as you can see I'm not a Stallmanite or a Microsoftie in my software politics but somewhere between the two.
Member since:2006-12-07
--- citation ---
In general I believe these should be under the GNU GPL or similar licensing with exceptions for linking system calls into proprietary programs in order to prevent one company monopolies that can dictate to other software and computer manufacturers on what their products should be like Microsoft does. (This is why Linux is my favorite OS.)
--- end of citation ---
I thought that Linux is your favorite OS because it meets your needs. It looks to me that you have chosen OS on political criteria. Personally I would have never done that. Correct me if I am wrong.
Member since:
2006-12-07
It is almost two years since the initial deal between Novell and Microsoft. What happened ? What har has come to Linux users ? To Microsoft customers ? I don't see any.
Only thing I noticed recently is that I am able to write VB.Net program on Linux and run it on Windows. I am able to deploy ASP.NET web application on Apache. I think that 2 years ago it worked with C# only. Yes, recently I had need for that, and, to my surprise, it worked. As far as I am concerned it's a good thing.
On the other hand, SCO threat was removed couple of years ago. Destroying SCO doesn't mean much to Linux any more.
I think that original post was more about ideology and politics, and less about computers and IT.
DG