I'm investigating putting together a panel on the SCO/Linux nonsense. Finding informed commentators is hard, but it looks like we'll at least have someone from high up in Novell. Brad Kuhn from the FSF will be at OSCON anyway, so I hope he can be on the panel too. There are also a relatively large number of IP lawyers attending OSCON this year, so we should be able to find a participant there.
--Nat
Re:As long as there's a cancel clause...
hfb on 2003-05-29T19:38:15
Not to mention that there really is nothing to be said that hasn't already been said about this whole thing. Most of the open source people in the press sound like a bunch of vapid idiots who won't get any points from the audience they claim this case is alienating. Maybe gather a class action suit at oscon but a panel? It's like preaching to the choir.
Re:As long as there's a cancel clause...
gnat on 2003-05-30T17:22:21
Actually, I think the case exposes some weaknesses with open source software in the area of patents and PR. Who rebuts SCO claims if SCO goes after Linus instead of IBM? What legal position are the users and creators of open source software in with respect to patent claims?Even if this is all magically resolved by OSCON (and don't forget that lawyer time is the opposite of internet time), there's still a lot of post-mortem work to be done.
--Nat
Re:As long as there's a cancel clause...
pudge on 2003-06-02T01:30:27
I agree. There's virtually no chance that the "what does this mean to me, as an open source developer?" question will be fully and adequately answered before OSCON rolls around.
It's nice that we've had a ~30 year run in Open Source with minimal legal troubles. The BSD lawsuit is probably the biggest and most important one, but at the end of it all, AT&T and UCBerkeley were both honorable citizens and let it just go away.
SCO is possibly the first instance of a bad player coming onto the scene and making noise about the origin of the sources in a big, important project. There will be more bad actors in the future, so understanding what the issues are is going to be increasingly more important. (Put it this way; I don't want my name in the credits of some open source project if Microsoft decides that it misappropriated Shared Source bits.)
So while the facts of the SCO case make for an interesting soap opera, but the core issues behind the case (and preventing future soap operas, er, court cases) are something I'd like to hear more about at OSCon.
Re:Kismet
VSarkiss on 2003-05-29T21:38:35
Actually, it's a circular left shift.
;-P Re:Kismet
djberg96 on 2003-05-29T22:36:29
use Set::String;
Set::String->new("OSCON")->rotate->print("\n");
Though I rarely shill my old employer these days, there are generally a large number of Red Hat names at the con, usually including Michael Tiemann.
While it is true that the panel could teeter on the brink of "preaching to the choir", and for that matter the issue may be settled by then, another factor to consider is that the attendance of OSCON is becoming broader and broader. It's not unrealistic to think that there may be a good-sized audience for whom the panel is truly informative.
