Appellate Courts Recognize Strike 3's Ability to Meet Standard for Early Discovery to Obtain John Doe Defendant's Name and Address
While some bullheaded District Court judges have stopped Strike 3 in its tracks by denying its request for early discovery, most appellate courts to have considered the issue find that Strike 3's allegations of copyright ownership and illegal downloading of their works by an identifiable IP address are enough to permit Strike 3 to discover the IP address owner's name and address.
Uh, no, Bill. Red Hat, which is now one of the more profitable parts of IBM, would not attempt anything stupid like that. Linux is all under the GPL and very much "free as in speech". Red Hat did have a little proprietary software, but it's not the core of Linux, just extras they sell (now as IBM).
There was, of course, a case about 15 years ago, wherein The SCO Group, which had at one point been a minor Linux distributor, decided to sue IBM and everyone else distributing or using Linux for patent and copyright infringement. They claimed that they owned Unix, having bought it from AT&T, and that Linux copied from Unix. It was preposterous, of course, but people make nutty claims and sometimes sell shares based on it. The case went on for a few years, eventually proving that SCO did not own Unix, just had a master license to distribute it, and that Linux was in any case original. Oh, and the claim that BSD (Open Source) too had copied from AT&T? That one got shown to be backwards; Berkeley's work was largely original and AT&T had taken some code from it.
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Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net Interisle Consulting Group +1 617 795 2701
***** Moderator's Note *****
RedHat not only attempted, but accomplished, something like that: the company exploited the open-source movement and managed to convince corporate America that it owned an operating system called "RedHat Enterprise Linux," after it relied on hackers like me to popularize its brand name.
Not only did RedHat prove that the average IT purchasing manager is a gullible fool, but it got very rich, very quickly, and then its owners cashed out to IBM and settled in to laughing themselves to sleep every night, while those of us who had made them their money were relegated to "Enthusiast" status and told that we would henceforth be allowed access only to the "Fedora" brand of products, so that we would be "privileged" to do RedHat's beta testing for them.
When we all finally got to see the man behind the curtain, I ranted about RedHat's business model and tactics in several posts to the Boston Linux & Unix User Group's discussion list: FYI, I've included some of the links here.
The original guru of Free Software (not to be confused with Open Source), Richard Stallman, explained the business model that he approved of. Software came Free, with a license allowing everyone to use it and modify the sources, but the vendor could make money selling support services. And that's what Red Hat did. RHEL is a fully supported operating system, competing with other paid OSs. A corporate buyer is not going to trust an important system to "let's check the forums and ask on IRC and Usenet if anybody knows how to deal with this problem". They want and need support, and are willing to pay for it. So RHEL has lots of free code, but you get support from experts (though I don't know how good their first-line help is; I never used it myself).
Your flames were written in 2003. In 2004, Centos kicked off its own distro, which is basically RHEL (minus any proprietary tools) recompiled for free. So you can run the same stuff on Centos as on RHEL; you just don't get IBM's support. What's not to like? You now have supported and free (as in beer) versions to choose from. And Fedora is there for hackers who like to play with the latest stuff, or developers, which is probably the major share of the desktop and educational Linux market.
I've seen Centos used in mission-critical embedded systems.
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Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net Interisle Consulting Group +1 617 795 2701
***** Moderator's Note *****
Fred, I'm sorry, but I was there. I believed RedHat's pitches, their oh-so-enthusiastic talk about obtaining world domination for Linux, and their we're-all-comrades-together tricks to get the techo-literate "back room boys" to talk up RedHat to our bosses, and then - surprise, surprise - it turned out that some animals really are more equal than others.
RedHat changed Linux, in every way they could, to make it look like and be treated like a separate OS. I looked back after they took the money and ran, and realized that I had learned a set of one-off file names, renamed utilities, and it's-not-here-it's-over-there directory structures. You're right: businessmen want support, but they want it inhouse, where they can get it at 3 AM, and the practical affects of all of RedHat's changes was to chain task-oriented support employees to the RedHat model.
That was the first of what Bruce Schnier would label "Semantic Attacks" - changing the appearance of the user interface and the file locations and the it's-just-Linux common core to something alien and owned. For practical purposes, RedHat took over Linux - not in theory or law, just in all the ways that they needed to make some quick cash.
That, of course, is my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
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