10 Jul 2003

Managing Free Software after SCO

The SCO v. IBM lawsuit may not be a significant legal threat to the freedom of free software, but it does put emphasis on questions of project management in the free software community. SCO’s irresponsible public statements about copyright infringement in the the Linux kernel, and its lawsuit claiming that the same program has included trade secret material wrongly contributed by IBM, have disquieted users. SCO’s legal claims and its less responsible public accusations are likely to fail, as I’ve said before. But users of free software should now get better answers from the free software community about how free software is made, so that they can understand more clearly why it is safe to copy, modify, and redistribute.

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permalink | columns/lu | 2003.07.10-00:00.00