Re: Irrevocability and intellectual property

Then your proposition that QPL protects against someone like IBM from
interferring with distribution of Herc is based not on upon any inherent trait of
the QPL or open source, rather its based upon your belief that IBM has no
property interest.  Makes your statement that "The QPL, like other Open Source
licenses, is irrevocable, and gives people the right to redistribute copies they
have in perpetuity" true only as a tautology --- no legal interest = no legal
interest.

SCO is not asserting any patent claims, and in consequence the down stream
distributional consequence of their prevailing  may be somewhat muted.  ie,
copyright violations are perhaps more straightforwardly routed around then, say,
patent claims.

Given your claim that IBMers agree you've done about all you could with regard to
IBM's property interests, why do you suppose they apparently decline to offer
software licensing on top of Hercules?

PDW




Jay Maynard wrote:

> On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 10:03:32AM -0400, Peter D. Ward wrote:
> > I believe IBM and SCO are fighting about "irrevocability" just now ....
>
> Indeed. While I think SCO's full of prunes, they do raise an interesting (in
> the Chinese sense of the word) question.
>
> > In the case of open source, someone's ability to affect its distribution
> > after the fact might depend on their property interest in the thing being
> > distributed.  Situation one, if they freely contributed their property to
> > the mix, then I would agree with your statement.  Situation two, if they
> > had no property contributed at all, then I would agree with your
> > statement.  I'm not sure which of those two you are asserting in this
> > case.
>
> My position is as is has always been: Hercules was implemented using only
> information that was obtained in legal ways that do not violate trade secret
> or copyright protections. (Trademarks are not at issue; if they were, I'd
> have heard about it, and made appropriate changes already.) Therefore, there
> are no intellectual property issues, with the possible exception of patent
> infringement - and that issue is solely IBM's to raise. They have not done
> so.
>
> > If its not either of these situations,  rather its for example some
> > unauthorized "contribution" of someone else's property, then I assume you
> > will agree the open-source-ness of the effort is irrelevant to the
> > question of the property holder's rights in the matter.
>
> Yes and no. In the case of SCO vs. Linux (yes, I know it's officially IBM at
> the moment, but that will change if they prevail in the first attempt),
> while SCO's rights in its intellectual property would in fact continue
> unabated, the practical effect would be considerably muted. I strongly doubt
> they could do more than force Linus to incorporate changes in his official
> kernel to remove the violation. That doesn't have even the tiniest effect on
> people who have versions without those changes: as a practical matter, SCO
> could do nothing to stop them from distributing it, samizdat-style. Yes,
> they could force Red Hat and friends to distribute the modified kernel, but
> that's about it.
>
> There's an article on ZDNet's web site today that asks "What if SCO wins?",
> at http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-1010007.html . John Carroll raises an
> interesting argument, but I think he has too inflated an opinion of the
> efffects of the GPL on the subject. I believe that that's one violation of
> the GPL that neither the Free Software Foundation nor Linus Torvalds will
> have any interest in pursuing.
>
>
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>
>
>
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