« Right in the Middle In Favor of "Open Choice" | Main | Quality Assurance in OSS: Software Development's Second Cousin Comes to the Party »

You can’t call yourself an open source software (OSS) analyst unless you comment on a Utah Federal District Court ruling handed down on August 10. So here goes:

The judge ruled against SCO and in favor of Novell on a number of claims related to the original AT&T UNIX copyrights, circa 1972. IBM, Microsoft, and any company that runs Linux are also involved. But I don't get all the OSS blogosphere excitement. It’s the usual lineup of jumped-to conclusions: a new day has dawned, Linux is liberated, Microsoft is toast, and so forth. If only OSS adherents would spend more time developing OSS than blogging about Microsoft.

First of all, I didn’t see anything that decided whether IBM or anyone else inappropriately put any UNIX IP in Linux. If they did, the OSS blogosphere believes (and Novell has said--see their web site; it says there's a statement but it won't open for me) that Novell will do the right thing and indemnify (or whatever the right legal wording would be) IBM, and the OSS community from further action. But Novell’s shareholders would then have grounds for a class-action suit against Novell’s management for wasting its assets (or whatever the right legal wording would be).

And despite the cheering, all parties agreed that this ruling had nothing to do with patents, only the ownership of the UNIX copyrights. This has two implications to the OSS community:
1.) Microsoft’s claims that over 200 hundred of its patents have been violated by OSS distributors (and users) are totally unaffected by this ruling.
2.) Despite OSS philosophy, U.S. courts have no problems enforcing legitimate copyrights and patents when it comes to software.

Most important, the words “open source software” appear no where in the 102-page ruling that I could see. Apparently, judges like to keep their rulings narrow. This ruling hinged on some pretty narrow wording in two documents written in 1995 and 1996. This was the classic “lost on a technicality,” and would appear to have very little implications for the wider OSS community or business model.

Oh, and of course, the ruling itself will most likely be appealed for years and years.

When the dancing in the ether ends, nothing will have changed.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2219