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| IBM's Jim Stallings on Linux and Proprietary Software |
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Thursday, October 09 2003 @ 06:28 PM EDT
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There is an interview with IBM's Jim Stallings on Red Hat's site, and I thought you'd be interested in what he has to say about Linux in the enterprise going forward: "Q4: We touched on this a little bit earlier, but where does IBM see Linux evolving in the enterprise?
"A4: In the enterprise, we see Linux continuing to grow into spaces that have been traditionally occupied by UNIX, until the differences are indistinguishable. As I said earlier, we see Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 as being a big step in that direction. As Linux continues down this path, we can rely on the open source community to ensure that Linux both continues to improve, and remains rooted in open standards. That's important from our point of view.
"Customers know that businesses can change very quickly -- because of the economy; changing security requirements, corporate consolidation, new business models or products (or competitors with new business models or products) -- and customers have to respond to that. Closed, inflexible 'one size fits all' business models and IT solutions are just not consistent with the business realities customers deal with in the real world.
"The openness of Linux and our commitment to open standards will ensure that Linux continues to evolve in a way that meets customer's needs, so they can flex and adapt to changing circumstances. We call that being an 'On Demand' business.
"Q5: Can you comment on the coexistence of open source and proprietary alternatives, given that IBM has solutions to offer in both worlds?
"A5: It's not about open source versus proprietary solutions. It's about open source and proprietary solutions, which are based on open standards and so are working together. This way, the customer has choice.
"As I've learned from customers in the past year, TCO means 'take cost out.' We have a global economy with slow growth, and in some geographies, no growth. So value is the killer app right now. Open source solutions can help customers get there. Increasingly, it's helping governments get there. So it's not going to be one or the other; it's going to be both.
"We have a cohabitation strategy, not an exclusionary strategy built on proprietary software. There's no way you can remove open source from the picture at this point, and those who think you can are just fooling themselves. It's not going to be a proprietary-only world ever again."
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 09 2003 @ 06:52 PM EDT |
NEW YORK, Sept 29 (Reuters) - SCO Group Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOX), which is suing
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) over the rights to the Linux
operating system, said on Monday that IBM's legal case is based on a
"shaky foundation."
IBM filed an amended counterclaim to SCO's suit on Friday saying that SCO had
damaged IBM's business with its lawsuit.
SCO sued IBM in March, claiming the company had infringed on its rights for
embedding parts of SCO's Unix software code into versions of the free Linux
operating system. IBM filed a countersuit in August.
SCO, which did not comment on the amended complaint initially, in a statement on
Monday did not directly address IBM's claims that its business was damaged and
criticized IBM's use of the general public license in its defense.
The general public license is a license that accompanies open source software
giving everyone the right to use and modify the software as long as they make it
available to everyone else.
"SCO believes that the GPL...is a shaky foundation on which to build a
legal case," SCO said in a statement.
"We are confident that SCO will win the legal battle that IBM has now
started over the GPL," it added.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 09 2003 @ 06:52 PM EDT |
I hear you brother! Now if we could only convince MS about that last
statement "It's not going to be a proprietary-only world ever
again" then
we would be all set.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: bobh on Thursday, October 09 2003 @ 07:21 PM EDT |
If I were more litigious, I would sue IBM for damages. Reading this article, and
listening to this IBM guy go on and on about open standards, caused me to fall
out of my chair.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Trepalium on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 02:31 AM EDT |
| Some people wanted to see the differences between BSD4.4
and Linux 2.6, so I
ran comparator on them, and prettied
up the results a bit. You can take a
look at them here.
One thing that stands out a bit is drivers/isdn/i4l/
isdn_bsdcomp.c and
drivers/net/bsd_comp.c which quote the
BSD license with advertising clause
(which is supposed to
be GPL incompatible). Some of the Sparc assembly code
is
directly copied, along with BPF, some of the networking
comments, etc.
I've also uploaded the
complete
comparator report, although I did edit portions of it
(some
of the BSD file lists for the generic copyright
notices, and some firmware
images that used long runs of
all zeros). Whereas most of the examples in
the first are
pretty much copied text from one to the other, the "full"
report should be taken more as a list of common code.
The first report
relies on 5 or more duplicated lines of
code, the second on only 3. Any other
publically available
trees that should be compared? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 04:05 AM EDT |
By: Joe Firmage
Former Vice President of Strategy [1997] for Novell's
Network Systems Group,
http://www.business-standard.com/ice/story.asp?Menu=119&story=24653 [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: geoff lane on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 04:25 AM EDT |
| In Stowells
email to
The Register
he
claims
"You can’t take code based on a license you signed, change it a little
and then give it away for free (as in the case of XFS from
SGI)."
Stowell has a minor point, signing a license is signing a
contract and all contracts can be revoked if the terms are
not followed.
However, as yet SCO hasn't provided one iota of evidence of any action on
behalf of IBM, SGI and others that would justify their claims and legal
actions.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 06:33 AM EDT |
"SCO: irrevocable doesn't mean forever"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33326.html
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: egan on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 06:56 AM EDT |
| Here
Surely Andrew Orlowski deserves to hear Groklaw's
reply to this.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: belzecue on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 09:25 AM EDT |
| zdnet article: Ba
ll back in ACCC's court...
"O'Shaughnessy said the ball was now in the
ACCC's court and stressed the regulator had not yet launched a formal
investigation. However, he added that the vendor still intended to make the
licences available to commercial users of Linux in Australia by the end of the
current calendar year."
This Xmas in Oz, Santa will be carrying a gun and
wearing a 'got Unix in your Linux?' t-shirt.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 09:36 AM EDT |
This is just 100% pure speculation:
If I remember right, IBM deny AIX is a derivative of whatever SCO says it (Sys V
or something)
The other day, somebody posted a link to the AIX copyright page. This had
explicit mention of UC Regents.
Now I got to thinking about this, and started to wonder how IBM would likely act
after the settlement of USL v BSD
Now, I think everybody (everybody I know!) thinks that USL essentially lost
(okay the case was settled, but BSD continued on), because (1) some AT&T/USL
code might be forced into the public domain, and (2) AT&T/USL code was
included elements of BSD without attributions, in violation of the BSD license.
My guess is that a lot of AT&T licensees, would just have continued using
whatever elements of the AT&T/USL code that they used in their products.
However, IBM, always had lots of lawyers always looking at the risk to the
company
I think it's possible that they might think something like: Some of the code we
got in AIX (via AT&T/USL/etc) might be BSD code without attributions. Uh-oh
this makes our ability to enforce copyright harder and potentially exposes us to
liability.
Now what would be the solution?
Possible Answers: (1) Go to the real BSD base, or (2) strip out any potentially
tainted material, or (3) strip out all AT&T/USL material. In case of 2/3,
followed by (a) clean room rewrite, or (b) clean room free from AT&T/USL
code but with access to BSD code (using only BSD code in accordance with BSD
license).
Now if they did something that, and to be fair I don't know that they did,
there might be very little, or even no, AT&T/USL code left in AIX.
There is admittedly one obvious hole in this theory. If they did something like
that - why sign the 1996 license. Possible Answers: They might still want the
AT&T code for testing, for other products, or because they had not yet
completed the process of migrating away from AT&T/USL code.
As I said at the start, this is all speculation. My opinion is it seems that it
might be possible that something like this happened, but I don't know whether
it did.
Any other comments? Opinions?
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- AIX, Derivatives and BSD - Authored by: brenda banks on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 09:56 AM EDT
- AIX, Derivatives and BSD - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 12:30 PM EDT
- AIX, Derivatives and BSD - Authored by: beast on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 03:33 PM EDT
- AIX, Derivatives and BSD - Authored by: krow on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 09:35 PM EDT
- AIX, Derivatives and BSD - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 11:50 PM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 04:19 PM EDT |
One of IBM's letters to SCO says that it would agree to keep confidential the
SCO material found in discovery:
http://www.groklaw.com/pdf/Doc-45-Exhibits/Exhibit-G.pdf
see General Objection no. 10.
RedHat is demanding to see the code that SCO says is infringing. Now I am
wondering if RedHat would agree to keep it confidential, or would they demand
that the code be left open to the public when SCO turns it over to RedHat (if
they ever do).
I can see why IBM wouldn't need the code public because the lawsuit is about a
contract dispute. But RedHat is suing over public attacks. That means it would
want the code made public. Then 10,000 open source programers could pour over it
and determine the code is all legal and demonstrate it to the public.
It seems to me that SCO has no valid legal reasons for keeping the allegedly
infringing code secret. To start, it is already out in the public. SCO gives
two reasons for keeping it confidential: 1) the "erase the
fingerprints" one 2) alleged contractual obligations. I doubt the judge
would buy either of them.
SCO is extremely reluctant to reveal the code. So if RedHat refused to agree to
confidentiality, and the judge approved, then maybe SCO would decide not to hand
it over. And in that case it would have forfeited the case and so I suppose the
judge would order it to stop making accusations against Linux, like happened in
Germany. But maybe SCO will go ahead and hand it over anyway.
Anybody have an idea how soon is this issue is going to come to a head in court?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: ljdursi on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 04:39 PM EDT |
A5: It's not about open source versus proprietary solutions. It's
about open source and proprietary solutions, which are based on open standards
and so are working together. This way, the customer has choice.
This may be the single most intelligent paragraph I've
ever read about proprietary `vs.' open-source code. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: ChrisP on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 05:31 PM EDT |
I've just noticed that Groklaw has moved again. So thanks to the old hosts for
suffering under the load, and to Ibiblio for taking it on. And to the team that
made the latest switch so transparent! Well done all.
Cheers,
Chris.
---
SCO^WM$^WIBM^W dammit, no-one paid me to say this.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: 3DSaxon on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 06:50 PM EDT |
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Governments just can't stay away from open source.
and
Bill's back on target [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 10:09 PM EDT |
IANAL, but I've been thinking about this stuff. Would this be plausible:
One of IBM's affirmative defenses is "The complaint fails to state a
claim upon which relief can be granted."
Now I think mozillaquest is not always the best place for legal opinions :-) but
at the time they said that IBM might be laying the ground work for a motion to
dismiss. That seems a reasonable interpretation to me.
Next, we get to the motion to compel discovery. Basically, we get here that IBM
says SCO has failed to identify a single specific example of breach of trade
secrets, unfair business practises, etc. IBM essentially say SCO didn't give
meaningful answers to the questions (whereas their complaint is more specific),
and just said as to the documentation, "it's somewhere in these huge
warehouse of documents". IBM also cite cases that would mean that SCO
couldn't use something hidden in that mound of documents, unless they had first
told IBM precisely which document. In other words, IBM seems to be stating again
"fails to state a claim"
One interpretation is SCO don't have anything else. Another is they are just
sandbagging for time (but obvious question is why if they have specifics). There
could be others too.
Now I find it hard to believe that nobody at SCO would know that they have to
state a claim. And if for whatever reason it's arguable for IBM to say that
they haven't, they might be worried about dismissal.
Next go back to (I think) around June. In one of the interviews SCO (I think
McBride - somebody post URL if you have it), says something like - that SCO's
case is strong because IBM have not motioned for dismissal.
Anyway assuming it's not a pure BS or ill-informed line of argument, or even if
it is (it could still revealing what's on McBride's mind, much like the
turning around of phrases like "Shell Game"), it potentially shows
that at the time of interview, somebody at SCO was thinking about dismissal
issues, presumably for this exact reason ("fails to state a claim")
Comments?
Next, I was thinking about the declarative judgement. Why did IBM put that in?
If they win against SCO's claims, why would it be necessary?
Well I'm thinking, let's imagine IBM win on SCO's claims, and win by
dismissal. What will happen then? The countersuit will go on for a long time to
go. SCO is not likely to be dead quite yet.
So what might SCO do, during this period?
Well this is a hypothetical scenario, but I'd imagine it's at least possible,
that they might go round saying "Linux infringes, IBM won on a
technicality. They say we didn't present evidence, but we gave them millions of
pages and dozens of CD-ROMs of evidence."
So I'm wondering, is it possible for IBM get the declarative judgement before
the rest of their counterclaims are settled?
Of course, the unexpected (for SCO it seems) wildcard in this is Red Hat.
Is any of this plausible? IANAL, so I really don't know - somebody more
informed please fill me in.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 10:17 PM EDT |
| A interesting article today puts the agenda of corporatism to destroy, suppress
or co-opt open source into the context of neo-colonial, neo-liberal capitalism,
and that's to be found here.
It would be nice if all this were merely a
skirmish between a few greedy idiots and the practical ethos of the scientific
method, but Richard Stallman is -- despite all his flaws -- essentially
right.
Free/libre open source software is about politics. Not
partisan politics, but the economic politics of wealth concentration and control
by the first world and its servants in government and the industrial
technocracy. This will become even more clear as this long war plays out. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Hygrocybe on Friday, October 10 2003 @ 11:09 PM EDT |
The following has been posted on ZDNet Australia:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/os/story/0,2000048630,20279522,00.htm
and will be of interest as it indicates that SCO in Australia definitely intends
to have an invoice mail out before the end of this calendar year. A quote from
the article is below:
"(Kieren) O'Shaughnessy said the ball was now in the ACCC's (Australian
Competition and Consumer Commission) court and stressed the regulator had not
yet launched a formal investigation. However, he added that the vendor still
intended to make the licences available to commercial users of Linux in
Australia by the end of the current calendar year."
I wonder if this is because SCO thinks it may have a softer target in Australia
than with US companies and with theirs and your threats of immediate legal
action on receipt of an invoice ?
---
LamingtonNP[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: egan on Saturday, October 11 2003 @ 12:54 AM EDT |
Quote of the Day, from a Slashdot editor:
"Probably the best thing to do to prevent disinformation from entering
your company is to block articles by Rob Enderle."
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