On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 02:23:33PM -0400, Beinert, William wrote:
> In my opinion, McBride (lowlife, sniveling dog that he is) nevertheless
> makes a valid point: that if Open Source does not have a mechanism in
> place to prevent a repetition of the SGI developer's violation of IP,
> then large enterprises will not take the risk of using it.
Is there anything better than the programmer's word?
I mean, you can't honestly trust the filthy low-life linux hacker. But
Then those folks from SGI came and contributed this to us. How could we
have checked that this does not violate any NDA they might have? (We
still don't know that). We only have their word.
If you can't trust the programmers (and legal department ) of SGI and IBM
who is there left to trust? SCO?
In fact, AT&T already lost a cast due to similar issues.
OTOH, at least with free software the large enterprises can do their own
legal audits. Do you have any ideas how many such issues are left in the
code of Microsoft ("SQL Server 2000 patent")?
And Microsoft aggresivly pushes its own source licenses to all sorts of
bodies around the world.
It is just as easy to make up counter-claims to those claims.
--
Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend|
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