[TUHS] Re: SCO's "evidence" (was: RIP Darl McBride former CEO of SCO)

At 2024-11-07T13:59:18-0700, Marc Rochkind wrote: The copyright license applies to the copyrighted material in question. If you don't distribute material licensed under the GPL, the GPL does not apply to you. If you do, it does (barring any exceptions applicable under copyright law, or a superseding license granted by the copyright holder). Traditionally, people in the BSD camp and some others complained when someone like, say, the GNU Project took a BSD-licensed code base, made non-negligible contributions to it, and distributed the combination under the GPL. This practice won the GPL the charming characterization of "viral". That was a misleading description because if you extract the BSD-licensed code (and only that) back out of the combination, then you are no longer bound by the GPL. It can't touch you. Behold, you are cured of the "virus", which turns out to be an intrinsic property of the code, not something that replicates and propagates itself. However, if you were, say, Sun Microsystems, and did exactly the same thing as the GNU Project except you proclaimed your non-negligible contribution "all rights reserved", the aforementioned complainers fell silent. I've never heard a comprehensible justification for this disparity, though I do remember a NetBSD founder describing it to my face (yes, in person) as "true freedom"; I suppose it was because a lot of BSD people had dreams of starting a company and enjoying Bill Joy levels of wealth by putting proprietary "value-adds" on top of BSD--for all I know this was the BSDI business plan. That outcome was unlikely if they distributed their source code under share-and-share-alike terms. It can of course be tedious to reverse an admixture of code, especially the more time passes. This lesson was taught again, this time _to_ GPL advocates, when Red Hat decided to hide the Git history of their version of the Linux kernel from everyone but their paying enterprise services customers.[1] This was an effort to scrape off a free-riding competitor known as Oracle Enterprise Linux. With sophisticated revision control (and good change set discipline), it can be tractable to detangle code changes from certain parties. Git is now so ubiquitous in source configuration control that one can make the argument that a project's Git repository is the "preferred form of modification" under the terms of the GNU GPL itself. That interpretation would have been inconvenient for Red Hat, so, as a business necessity, it was not a correct one. Whether the GPL truly applies to the Linux kernel at all is an interesting question. It appears to me that it does--unless and until you pay membership dues to the Linux Foundation.[2] You can then treat it as being under the 2-clause BSD license, MIT/X11 license, or similar. If anyone knows of a counterexample (that is, of a case of an LF member out of compliance with the GPL _in the Linux kernel_ being compelled to come into compliance), I'm all ears. Regards, Branden [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/430098/ [2] a U.S. 501(c)6 "business league", not a 501(c)3 charity Classically, this sort of cooperative arrangement is better known as a "cartel". That term was too useful to scholars and lay people alike in critical analysis of the behavior of firms, so it is now debased and used loosely to refer to a single, stereotypically non-federated and dictatorially commanded organization[3] that manufactures and/or trafficks in contraband such as illegal drugs. We don't even refer to OPEC as a cartel anymore. (According to Google ngram, that usage peaked in 1977 and by 2022 has declined to about 8% of its former level. I wonder if that has to do with the Iranian Revolution and subsequent much closer ties between the U.S. and KSA.) [3] Then again, there's always Baltimore's New Day Co-Op... ;-)