Thursday, January 29, 2004

Open Source Initiative OSI - The Open Source Definition
Free and Open Source Software Interview Questions
He Hate Me™. Via Sports Law Blog
The 50 lies, exaggerations, distortions and half truths (among others) that took this country (and the UK) to war. Via Independent News

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

From Cato Institute's Adam Thierer, Collectivism In, Property Rights Out: "In their work, the commons crusaders often lambaste property rights, fearing that too much private control of infrastructure, wireless frequencies, or intellectual creations threatens ideas, innovation, openness, and competition in this sector, and, in a much broader sense, our very culture and democracy. "
The New Republic Online: Beyond Belief: "Edwards's events here are like watching a roomful of formerly deaf people listen to music for the first time. People walk in as skeptics and leave as believers. "

Friday, January 16, 2004

The Center for Food Safety sues the FDA to, in essence, curb the marketing and sale of "ornamental fish," ones genetically engineered to glow, for instance. Their mantra, Stop the GloFish.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

SCO now denies that the IBM lawsuit concerns copyright violations? Right. SCO shows disputed code to IBM - Computerworld: "Monday's response included no examples of copyright violations, Stowell said. 'We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue.' "
Open Source Business Conference 2004 scheduled for March 16-17 at the St. Francis Hotel, SF.
From NewsFactor Network: SCO Goes Global with Linux License.
"There is some conjecture out that that because we are offering this licensing in the UK that we are also preparing to sue UK companies. I can assure you that is not the case right now," said Stowell. "The only companies in consideration of seeing a lawsuit are companies that SCO has met with and had dialogues with. SCO will give companies every opportunity to purchase a license before a lawsuit would be sent their way. We've tried to be fair about this."

In a late-December letter sent to approximately 3,000 companies, SCO issued a warning that it might pursue all possible legal options if those companies did not certify within 30 days that they had not violated source-code agreements.


From the Motley Fool:
If SCO thought threat-born licensing fees would provide a quick boost to the bottom line, it looks to have miscalculated. As fellow Fool Tom Taulli noted last month, SCO has tried to cast its lawsuits in apocalyptic terms. But with the entire computing world putting its money behind Linux, it appears that, for SCO, the apocalypse is now.
From a press release, news of Herman Miller, Inc.'s settlement of Aeron Chair Trade Dress Suit.
Sixth Circuit's opinion in lawsuit between holders of two marks, lawoffices.net and lawoffice.com. DeGidio v. West Group. White & Case represented West.
Funniest. Essay. Ever. The New Yorker: Shouts and Murmurs

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Richard Stallman interview for brit site PCpro. Unrepentent.

My vision for 20 years from now is that all published software, aside from what is embedded in ROM in appliances that can't load new software or talk to any other devices, is free software. No one should ever be told, 'You can have this attractive software, but you cannot see what it does, change it, or redistribute copies to others.' The freedom to do these things is a human right that must never be denied.
Paper by Prof. Heverly, Norwich Law School, on the nature of information as property and its ownership, titled "The Information Semicommons."
Interesting discussion from Prof. Volokh on the copyrightability of athletic events and the like, raised in the context of a lawsuit between the Chicago Cubs and owners of buildings with rooftop views of the action on the field.
SCO takes Linux licensing overseas | CNET News.com: "Companies outside the United States that use Linux now face the threat of legal action from the SCO Group, following the announcement Wednesday that SCO's licenses are available worldwide. "
EFF's clarion call to action against WIPO's "restrictive intellectual property regimes" and in support of "open and collaborative development models (OCDM)."
EFF files amicus brief in DirectTV's appeal of the dismissal of its action against a "smart card" technology owner. The press release. The Brief.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Novell identifies the 11 copyrights it claims in the UNIX Sys V and releases its correspondence with SCO over the matter on a web page it calls NOVELL: Novell's Unique Legal Rights. Tit for tat, SCO responds.

Monday, January 12, 2004

Open-source databases gaining favor | CNET News.com. Usage of MySQL, for example, rose 30% over the past year, while usage of Microsoft's SQL Server and Access databases increased just 6%.
Forbes.com: SCO approached Google about Linux license

SCO Group Inc., the software company that is suing IBM and extracting royalties from other Linux users, said Friday that it had held "low-level talks" with Internet search engine Google about a license agreement.

"Certainly if they're using 10,000 Linux servers that include our intellectual property as part of Unix, we would want them to license," said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman.
Fund Planned to Defend Users of Linux

The defense fund is the latest move in a legal and marketing chess match that pits the companies and programmers supporting Linux against a small Utah company, the SCO Group. SCO owns the license rights to the Unix operating system and contends that Linux, a variant of Unix, violates its license and copyright. Its opponents deny this and say the company's rights are nowhere near as broad as SCO contends.

The legal defense fund is an effort to allay the worries and reduce the risk to corporations, which increasingly use Linux as an operating system to run data-serving computers that power big networks and Web sites. Linux is distributed free, and is debugged and improved by a global community of programmers. Technology companies do charge for providing technical support for Linux, and manufacturers sell a lot of server computers that run the Linux system. In corporate data centers, Linux has emerged as a strong alternative to Unix and Microsoft Windows.

The fund is to be administered by the Open Source Development Laboratories, a consortium seeking to hasten the adoption of Linux. The group's 30 members, besides I.B.M. and Intel, include companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Novell.

The lab employs, among others, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who wrote the initial kernel of Linux and oversees the development of the operating system.



Novell will also offer an indemnification program for its SuSE Enterprise Linux customers. The program is designed to protect the users against intellectual property challenges to Linux and to help reduce the barriers to Linux adoption in the enterprise. More.

Friday, January 09, 2004

The SCO December 19 letter to numerous Linux-using companies citing specific code in Linux it claims was taken from its Unix intelectually property.

But Novell has registered 11 copyrights on the Unix System V source code that is at the center of SCO's battles.
The move pits Novell against SCO with dueling copyright registrations to much of the same Unix code. Lindon, Utah-based SCO earlier in the year had filed its own registrations of Unix copyrights.

The SCO December 18 letter demanding certification from UNIX licensees that they aren't contributing code to the open source OS.

Meanwhile, SCO reports that it generated $10.3 million in revenue in fiscal 2003 from its SCOsource licensing initiative, which was derived from licensing agreements reached with Microsoft and Sun.
McBride said he was happy with SCO's progress in the IBM case and the discovery process. In the meantime, McBride warned Unix licensees and Linux users that SCOsource would legally pursue all companies that contribute to or use Linux. By the end of January, McBride said, companies using Linux have three choices: 1) Cease and desist any use of Linux; 2) obtain a license from SCO to use Linux at $699 per CPU (the licensing fee to go up to $1,399 at some time in the future); or 3) continue to use Linux, and lose all rights to the company's Unix license and face SCO in court.

McBride couldn't characterize how much income this move would bring in, but he said he hoped it will be substantial. He emphasized that these points were not based on the IBM suit and that companies should not wait until that issue is resolved since SCO will be taking action long before that case is decided sometime in 2005. Once more, McBride said that IBM and Linux distributors, thanks in part to the GPL, were pushing the responsibility for any licensing or legal costs to Linux users.