On September 18th, UnitedLinux, the consortium of Conectiva, The SCO Group (formerly Caldera), SuSE, and Turbolinux, announced that Paula Hunter, an “experienced technology executive and consortium leader,” would be its worldwide general manager. The beta will be available on September 23rd, but not from the UnitedLinux site. Users, who want to give it a test drive, should go to one of the partners’ sites to download copies of the binaries, ISO images or source code. Gregory said that the open beta would satisfy the needs of both the UnitedLinux industry partners and the open source community.” In the meantime, the FSF sent an open letter to UnitedLinux, regarding the GPL violations that might be already in place or to be introduced by its license scheme.
UnitedLinux: New Leadership, Open Beta and GPL Headaches
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Eugenia Loli
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I realize that UL probably thinks their upcoming open beta disposes the GPL/NDA flap, but I doubt FSF thinks that way. This new GM should realize that the sooner they answer the criticism, the better off they’ll be, even if it amounts to “we made a mistake and we won’t do it again”.
UL is not going to be able to sell if there are questions about their GPL status. Corporations are not going to want to get into a situation of shipping / using a product whose legal status is unclear. I expect they will comply fully. This legal game of an NDA is standard corporte practice the problem is they aren’t they license holder; my guess is that it is a mistake and once their legal department is asked to comment on the issue they will agree 100% with Stalmann that they are in violation and move quickly to rectify the situation.
If they have a contract where each beta tester becomes officially an unpaid employee of UnitedLinux, they don’t have to distribute the sources to them. Like Lindows.
But I’m unclear about what they are doing now. FSF thinks that UL would be not fully Free Software because SCO, SuSE and Turbo had in many times used non-Free Software. But these are normally in the form of configuration applets, etc., which isn’t covered by UL.
FSF: Leave UL around. If they violate the GPL, which I doubt, when it is released, go ahead and get the software authors to sue them.
If they have a contract where each beta tester becomes officially an unpaid employee of UnitedLinux, they don’t have to distribute the sources to them. Like Lindows.
But I’m unclear about what they are doing now. FSF thinks that UL would be not fully Free Software because SCO, SuSE and Turbo had in many times used non-Free Software. But these are normally in the form of configuration applets, etc., which isn’t covered by UL.
FSF: Leave UL around. If they violate the GPL, which I doubt, when it is released, go ahead and get the software authors to sue them.
Lindows IMHO was also in violation of the GPL. If I’m injured during beta testing UL does the UL consortium pay? If I use the beta to engage in criminal acts are they jointly liable or the civil front? This idea that you become an unpaid employee doesn’t work; and especially since companies can’t be employees of other companies. The whole thing is legal fiction and would get thrown out the first time it was challenged. Lindows was so intensively disliked by the community the FSF didn’t figure they had to do anything no one really wanted the code; Calderaand Suse have written good stuff.
As for the original authors, remember the FSF controls some of the rather vital parts like glibc they don’t need to hunt up anyone.
> FSF: Leave UL around. If they violate the GPL, which I
> doubt, when it is released, go ahead and get the software
> authors to sue them.
I’m pretty sure that the reason GNU holds the copyright on all GNU software is so that they don’t have to find software authors and convince them to defend their copyright. GNU can do it themselves.
A day with the GPL is like a day on the farm. Every source file’s a banquet! Every download a fortune! Every com-pi-lation a parade! I LOVE the GPL!
[couldn’t resist :]
Rajan,
Lindows violated GPL, then FSF forced them to change the NDA and forced them to release the source code.
http://www.lindowsos.info/article.php?sid=16
Secondly, a distribution is a distribution — doesn’t matter whether it’s alpha or beta. The following is a quote from an interview with Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer of IBM who headed the team to port linux to the S/390 mainframe.
QUOTE
Now let me give you an interesting story to start off with. When we had done the so called patch for 390, as I already told this morning, I had a talk with Linus Torvalds about it. I think it was early November 1999, I had an appointment with Linus Torvalds and my key engineer Boas Betzler and Boas wanted to show Linus what this patch was all about, so that he could read into it a little bit and give us advices, on how to do it differently or whatever, right?
I had made this appointment. When our lawyers got hold of the fact that I wanted to show running Linux kernel, including our patch to Linus Torvalds they all of sudden got this idea: “What the hell are you doing? You are doing a distribution”. I had no idea what a distribution is and I had not the feeling that I was distributing anything when I showed it to Linus Torvalds but I learned about those legal effects later.
Nevertheless, they said “You can not do this”. So I said: “You have a problem. I have an appointment with Linus Torvalds in three days and I will hold this appointment so you’d better make sure what I can do.”
So we found out that, I could show this nice running code to Linus Torvalds 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.
So this was what I learned: Basically after that I understood what was critical about a distribution.
END QUOTE
http://www.sslug.dk/patent/strassemeyer/transr-del.shtml
There had been no court cases on GPL since 1999 — so IBM’s legal stance regarding distribution still stands. That’s why IBM doesn’t do distributions — their IP lawyers won’t let them.
At the time, IBM hadn’t announced to anyone about their secret port. Nobody outside the company had even heard about the project, let alone outside closed beta testers. Linus was going to be the first person outside the company to see this ALPHA code. The codes hadn’t been beta tested by outsiders, hadn’t been accepted into linux kernel maintree yet. Yet, IBM lawyers regard such private demostration to Linus to be a potential distribution.
Lindows IMHO was also in violation of the GPL. If I’m injured during beta testing UL does the UL consortium pay? If I use the beta to engage in criminal acts are they jointly liable or the civil front?
It is all in the contract, my friend. Only employers emoplying full time employees, IIRC, are liable for those. (Besides, how can one get injured for beta testing UL?)