“Microsoft reckon there is Microsoft code in Linux”
Today on the Dorset Linux Users Group mailing list, someone mentioned the news that “MS reckon there is MS code in Linux”
This is, fortunately, not true.
A while back, Microsoft gave a company called SCO a lot of money to try this, and it failed.
The idea was that the kernel Linux is copyrighted code, and that it has included copyrighted code from SCO without permission. This simply was not the case, and all the code in the kernel is original or used with permission under the terms of the GNU Project’s General Public License (GPL).
If this had been the case, the kernel called Linux could either take the SCO code out, or stop being used. This would not be a problem, because the whole operating system is the GNU system, plus the Linux kernel.
This has been done several times with the FreeBSD kernel and the OpenSolaris kernel
If you call the whole operating system “GNU/Linux” or “GNU+Linux” then this is clear. I highly recommend taking up this habit, because it is a matter of fairness to the developers of the operating system we all love - to give the credit for the whole system to someone who came along later with a small part is unfair and just not nice.
(I recommend reading the Fedora mailing list post where I read about GNU systems without Linux and the GNU essay Whats in a Name?)
Calling the whole system “Linux” is very common though, and SCO didn’t appear to understand the distinction in court. Microsoft does, though, and is trying to attack the whole system with patents with the Novell-MS deal.
Patent law is totally different to copyright law. But a popular term, more popular than the term “Linux” for the whole GNU/Linux OS in fact, is “Intellectual Property”.
This term lumps together patents and copyright, and other totally different laws like trademarks and design rights. In short:
“Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as “intellectual property”—-a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill-advised to generalize about them. “It is best to talk specifically about “copyright,” or about “patents,” or about “trademarks.” The term “intellectual property” carries a hidden assumption—-that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property. “When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can’t be. To avoid the bias and confusion of this term, it is best to make a firm decision not to speak or even think in terms of “intellectual property”.”
(I also highly recommend reading a full essay on this subject.)
So patent law is very different from copyright law, and it is a mistake to compare them.
Patents, when applied to software, are really awful - and for all programmers, not just Free Software ones - because they cover ideas.
So Microsoft figures that it has some idea patents on some ideas, and the GNU/Linux operating system is composed of software that expresses those ideas.
This clearly is nothing like “MS code in Linux” - its far worse.
At least, for the USA, it is far worse :-) For us, being in Europe, Software Idea Patents have been rejected several times, thanks to the lobbying of the Free Software movement.
(I highly recommend reading an article published in the Guardian in 2005 about this lobbying, and a general overview of the two viewpoints.)
So, in the USA, what can be done about the MS-Novell deal?
According to Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation’s general counsel, the next version of the GPL will be out in January, and it will turn Novell into a “patent laundry”.
This means that any patents Novell has access to - like, all of Microsofts, say - the whole community has explicit access to - and puts Microsoft in a worse position than before the deal :-)
The end of that Register interview with Mogeln is especially interesting because it highlights the problem with the term “Open Source” - Moglen says that it doesn’t mean anything anymore!
(I highly recommend reading this essay on Why “Free Software” is a better term than “Open Source” if that statement strikes you as odd.)
The nice DLUG chap also mentioned http://www.boycottnovell.com/ but IMO the real reason to boycott Novell’s SUSE distribution of GNU/Linux is because it contains non-free software - just like Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. The only recommendable distriubtion is gNewSense which is Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper with the non-free software removed.
The “Microsoft reckon there is Microsoft code in Linux” by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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