Money makes the world go round...

[elfs]

I cannot believe this crap!

Look, if I write software, it's mine. It's my property. Do you know what the legal definition of "proprietary" means? It means, simply, owned by someone.

If I license the software to you, I still own it. It has my copyright on it. It's mine, I've just given you certain legal rights with respect to using it. One of those rights may be the right to redistribute the software; another right may be to examine the source code; another right may be to modify the source code; and finally, one right may be to redistribute the software with those modifications.

I may attach certain legal responsibilities to those rights, such as the right to attribution, or the maintenence of clear demarcations of responsibility between my original code and your changes.

SCO wants to argue that if I don't charge money, if I don't keep my property "secret," I have no right to make such agreements with others. Since I've not kept my intellectual property secret, I have no right to it as "property." I'm not being "proprietarian" in the sense SCO wishes to redefine this very common legal term.

The GPL is a contract; it's clear contract law. SCO wants to take away the hard work I've done and make it "fair game," to destroy my copyrights and void my contracts.

I'm so fucking furious right now I'm nearly seeing red.

Comments

[wendor.livejournal.com]

Unless I seriously misunderstand SCO's arguments (admittedly I haven't had time to research them in depth yet) those very same concepts would apply to the information and materials on the SCO web page, which they protected with a copyright notice and limited use clauses http://www.sco.com/company/legal/ but released for free via electronic distribution.

So SCO's argument would seem to imply that they don't consider their own copyright claims to be valid for the information served on their own web site and that it should, under Cy Pres doctrine, be considered released into the public domain.

Food for thought.

[wendor.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, in this open letter Darl even explains quite well the very factors of US copyright law that contradict SCO's claims regarding the GPL.
http://www.sco.com/company/openletter/

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

Don't get too upset. It'll be a shock if SCO wins. They've put down the shotgun and started using legal cluster bombs trying to hit *something* worthwhile.

The GPL is not a contract.

[blaisepascal]

It is, rather, a license: permission by the copyright holder to do something that they have a legal right to restrict or control. It's covered by copyright law.

There is no quid pro quo, there is no mutual consideration, there are no signatures. It is not an agreement between parties.

No one would ever try to enforce the GPL based on contract law.

The EULAs that many proprietary software companies want users to agree to as a condition of use are closer to contracts. And they have been litigated, with mixed success, under contract law. There have even been attempts to make the "click through" in so-called click through as legally binding as a signature.

Re: The GPL is not a contract.

[blaisepascal]

Oh yeah... in case it wasn't clear... I think SCO, or their legal team, has slipped a cam or two.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Elf, read the whole thing. SCO's gonna lose like a newbie mark at a high-stakes poker table. The stock has peaked, the execs have sold out, and now it's just a matter of making it look good for the SEC. I fully expect to wake up one morning and find the lot of'em have moved to Grand Cayman or something.

It's not going to make one bit of difference in the long run. They've tried invoicing people, and all they're getting if anything is a digitus impudicus from the FLOSS community.

It's not worth stressing over. They're being tag-teamed by a combo of SuSE, IBM, Red Hat, and the German government, and they're going to lose by sheer weight of bucks against them. Normally I would say this ain't right, but they blow whale chunks, so....