Re: Proposal: Motif Widget set
From: Erik Troan <ewt@redhat.com>
> On Sat, 20 May 2000, Julie wrote:
>
> > Ignoring the philosophical bent of any one distribution (such
> > as Debian's "we don't use it if it doesn't fit our private
> > definition of ``free''), is there a =legal= reason that Motif
>
> Who knows? Can you define what the Open Group meant by an open source
> operating system? We include Netscape with Red Hat, so is that an open
> source OS? Others include binary sound drivers for the kernel, are those
> open source?
Can anyone agree on what the GPL actually means? The
lawyers I've spoken with are more afraid of the ambiguity
in the GPL than the apparent intent.
> There is no point debating the merit's of the open groups license when
it's
> legally ambiguous at best. This isn't an issue of whether we like Motif,
> it's an issue of whether the license agreement is workable. It's not (I'm
> not going to risk a lawsuit from the Open Group over this).
Well, I have some bad news. Red Hat risks lawsuits every time
it releases code. I've read your SEC disclosures. I also know
that several of the major distributions violate US Copyright law
(I found this out when I was trying to demonstrate to an IP lawyer
that I held the copyright on Shadow and found that the copyright
notices are being stripped by man2html and the compilers are
stripping out notices that were supposed to be compiled in) and
one of the major on-line Linux documentation servers is doing it
as well. Removing copyright notices is a very clear-cut no-no
compared to an ambiguous license.
The Motif situation is tame by comparision. Send them a
registered letter stating your intent to distribute and that you
believe you are an "open source OS". Count to some amount
of time, then do it. They wrote the license and they are
responsible for making sure the terms are clear and well
defined.
Anyhow, I'd hope that someone approachs the Open Group
before deciding that their version of "free" isn't "free enough".
If those of us who wrote "free" code in the early 80's hadn't
adapted, the most you'd be able to sell Red Hat for is about
$1.50 and most of this discussion wouldn't be going on because
Red Hat never would have started as a business. Times change.
I see this very much like the situation betwee Red Hat and me
6 or so years back -- a philosophical disagreement over what
"free" means. I didn't want you selling code you didn't pay
for. They don't want you selling your proprietary operating
system if you are going to use their open source library. This
issue is going to come up more often as commercial software
houses start open sourcing parts of their code base.
If anyone wishes to continue this, please remove lsb-spec
from the To: list.
-- Julie.
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