BSD folks position on GPL, Novell, IBM, SCO, and MS...

[Jan Husar]

On 11/28/06, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> wrote:
> Mike Hauber <mchauber at gmx.net> writes:
> > I was just wondering what the general consensus was on the GPL, Linux in
> > general, SCOs lawsuit, Sun's open sourcing, IBMs contributions to Linux,
> > Novell's contributions, Novell's deal with MS and how this really affects
> > SuSe (there's a lot of hype on that and I literally don't know what to
> > believe at this point).
>
> Why should we care?
>
> The SCO lawsuits are doubly irrelevant: firstly because SCO is not
> going to win, secondly because BSD is immune by virtue of the 1994
> settlement with USL.
>
> As for the Novell-MS deal, I don't see how it affects BSD at all.

You are right, there is no direct affect on BSD however software
patents is in issue no matter if it's GPL or BSD mostly in United
States, in EU we are still fighting the patent problematics.

Today is voting in ITRE (Information, Technology, Research and Energy)
committee within European Parliament about IPRED (Intelectual Property
Rights Enforcment Directive) which basicly means, criminalization of
abusing of patents, trademarks and copyright (e.g. sentece to jail,
freeze of accounts and so on)


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|      Jan Husar
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