A Closer Look At Oracle's (Legal) Linux 66
A reader wrote to us with Matt Asay's Infoworld piece digging into the legal background of Oracle's indemnification offerings for Linux. Turns out, things are not quite so rosy as PR would make it seem. I know, I know...suprise all around. You can read Oracle's FAQ about it, but some of the tastier bits are that the indemnification covers *just* the kernel, and that whole thing about damage limits? Read what Matt has to say:'The indemnification is not in any way limited to the amount of money a customer has paid Oracle.
Apparently, Oracle's legal department missed the memo on this one. If you read Section J of the agreement (Limitation of Liability), you'll note that while Oracle offers unlimited indemnification for consequential damages related to an infringement claim (and that only for the one package, the Linux kernel), it caps all other damages at the amount you pay to Oracle.'
I prefer illegal linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares about Oracle linux. Redhat AS is damn good, Centos is a great free copy, and Ubuntu and the others are awesome for home/tinker/easy to use... How can they come so late to the game and even get near what redhat and Debian have done?
I take responsibility! (Score:3, Insightful)
Indemnification (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me preface this by saying I have no idea what I'm talking about and this is all guesswork. Then again, this is Slashdot..anyways:
Looking back at a previous [slashdot.org] story [infoworld.com], they mention:
Weren't most of the SCO lawsuits stating that only the Linux kernel contained their IP? Perhaps this is what Oracle had in mind when only offering to cover the kernel for purposes of indemnification.
Either way, I'm not very knowledgeable on the topic, but the linked article came off as kind of nitpicking
Re:What bits in the Linux kernel .. (Score:5, Insightful)
The indemnification thing is for executives that got spooked by the SCO debacle.
Oracle's own legal standpoint for GPL attributions (Score:5, Insightful)
Some basic facts for people to be aware of:
1. Dubious rebuild practices: They seem to be using centos as a buffer to Red Hat. See http://oss.oracle.com/linux/legal/oracle-list.htm
2. Dozens of bloggers and community members are already calling it a failure. see the following for your current opinion: http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompa
Oracle seems to be walking a very fine line with overall compliance with the GPL. They have taken some patches from centos and removed the user attribution.
Personally, CentOS http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org] has already proven to be a top notch alternative to RHEL, and while there's no indemnification, it works far better than oracle linux seems to at this point, and they provide more community support than oracle seems to want to.
Re:I prefer illegal linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reversal. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not doing this because they truly think Open Source is a festering pile of stolen code; if they did, they'd be suing. How to determine motivation from actions [jerf.org]: The question is not whether motivation A "explains" action B, the question is whether given motivation A, is action B the best action? Given the belief that open source has a lot of stolen code, the "best action" would be a lawsuit blitz. Since they aren't doing that and are just trying to sow FUD, my conclusion is they do not believe that open source has a lot of stolen code. The motivation that matches is that they want to hobble open source; in that case, this is [what they believe is] their best action.
Business IT may not always be the most tech savvy people, but they are business savvy; this is going to work for a while but you can only talk about vague patent violations for so long before they notice that if they were real you'd be actually suing. That makes this a fairly pathetic attack; eventually everybody is going to see through it and they'll have spent real credibility on this last-ditch effort.
This is coming up because as pathetic as it is for that reason, it's the best attack they've got. RMS deserves some props for this, and anyone else who helped design and promote the copy-left ideal; it's a brilliant judo-flip on the copyright system. They can't invalidate Open Source licensing without also taking out their own licensing practices.
(Which is also why you see so many people trying to invalidate it on the grounds that they didn't have to pay money for it, as it, too, is the only available legal attack, and it doesn't work, because even if it works it doesn't mean GPL software is "public domain" in the full legal sense, it means it's a copyrighted work you have now no rights to possess or distribute. Oops.)
It's not about stolen code, it's about trying to find some way, any way to slow down open source. ("Stopping" it is almost certainly an unrealistic goal and I doubt they are really trying that, as I think in that case "best action" swings back to "lawsuit flurry", in the desperate hope that maybe they can win something important.)
Re:I prefer illegal linux (Score:5, Insightful)
What have you done to shorten the wait?
Re:Indemnification (Score:3, Insightful)
The guy is analysing a legal agreement, in particular its Limitation of Liability section. Nitpicking is required and, in fact, is the important thing.