[wplug] McBride's Open Letter to the OpenSource community

[John Harrold]

Sometime in September Vanco, Donald assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Some of the best reading yet on the code controversy.....
| http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34007_p.htm
| <http://www.linuxworld.com/story/34007_p.htm> 

interesting how they quote people:

     The second development was an admission by Open Source leader Bruce
     Perens that UNIX System V code (owned by SCO) is, in fact, in Linux,
     and it shouldn?t be there. Mr Perens stated that there is ?an error in
     the Linux developer?s process? which allowed Unix System V code that
     ?didn?t belong in Linux? to end up in the Linux kernel

     Mr Perens continued with a string of arguments to justify the ?error in
     the Linux developer?s process.? However, nothing can change the fact
     that a Linux developer on the payroll of Silicon Graphics stripped
     copyright attributions from copyrighted System V code that was
     licensed to Silicon Graphics under strict conditions of use, and then
     contributed that source code to Linux as though it was clean code
     owned and controlled by SGI. This is a clear violation of SGI?s
     contract and copyright obligations to SCO. We are currently working to
     try and resolve these issues with SGI.
 
 
 whee we look at bruce's words in context:
 
      Slides 10 through 14 show memory allocation functions from Unix System
     V, and their correspondence to very similar material in Linux. Some of
     this material was deliberately obfuscated by SCO, by the use of a
     Greek font.  I've switched that text back to a normal font.
     
     In this case, there was an error in the Linux developer's process (at
     SGI), and we lucked out that it wasn't worse. It turns out that we
     have a legal right to use the code in question, but it doesn't belong
     in Linux and has been removed.
     
     These slides have several C syntax errors and would never compile. So,
     they don't quite represent any source code in Linux. But we've found
     the code they refer to. It is included in code copyrighed by AT&T and
     released as Open Source under the BSD license by Caldera, the company
     that now calls itself SCO. The Linux developers have a legal right to
     make use of the code under that license. No violation of SCO's
     copyright or trade secrets is taking place. 

so one of the two big developments in august was that someone stripped out
a copyright notice. eek. 

-- 
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 john harrold                                  | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign
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 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,
 whether the mad destruction is brought under the name of totalitarianism or
 the holy name of liberty and democracy?
 --Gandhi
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