[Eglin]

Originally Posted by a_Guest03

My complaint with your statement is that you display HP in a negative light when they offer their shelter to their enterprise customers. I think it's a wonderful offer, and that we shouldn't fault them for defending their own.

The misrepresentation of the offer is problem.

I don't think we're looking at this from the same perspective. If HP's goals were as magnanimous as you seem to think, then the correct action would be either to license the technologies in question from SCO or to drop them from their products altogether.

Instead, HP is leveraging FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) from the SCO fiasco to lock their customers into submission. If you can't modify your HP-based Linux without opening yourself up to legal attack, then you are essentially dependent on HP as a vendor. This is CRAP! I, personally, have contributed to many packages that are included with _all_ modern versions of Linux. Most of these packages were distributed under the GPL to prevent just this sort of thing! My code was released under the GPL to ensure that everyone who uses it has just the sort of freedom that HP's move is trying to limit. My rebuttal may be a little too verbose, since you appear to agree with me to some extent, but I wanted to be very clear that I think HP's response is as dirty as SCOs actions (in terms of direct affect to me, at least).

It should be very clear in the future that they only will assist their enterprise customers in legal battles.

You've got to be kidding. I think that reading the fine print of the conditions necessary to gain indemnity for the SCO stuff will pretty clearly illustrate that your statement is a fallacy. HP knows it isn't going to take any losses on this. It is a marketing ploy. Like I said above, it may be true that HP _already_ has license to utilize the SCO code in question, so it may be that they risk _nothing_ under _any_ circumstances by offering indemnity in this case.

The enterprise people do pay the bills, after all. Let them buy the license. Let their defense benefit us all.

See, that's the thing... For the majority of the Linux, HP doesn't _own_ the license. Most of it is GPL, and the fact that people are so confused about the facts is terribly disturbing. If you were, in fact, going to "buy a license" to use Linux, you sure as hell wouldn't buy it from HP.

When measuring the implications of all this activity, most neophites are going to incorrectly lump all open-source tools as "being Linux," too. On this forum alone, I've seen people make obviously misinformed statements about GCC ports (ala, "the cygwin GCC dist. is a linux emulator"). I don't know about you, but if I have to go back to using the shitty Sun Micro disktools (ack! rm -i doesn't work!), I'm going to go gonzo. Not to mention the fact that there isn't a UNIX vendor alive who makes a compiler better than GCC. You remember the days when UNIX vendors didn't include compilers in their OS dist? You had to license them seperately. Imagine what it would be like to go back to that because your braindead boss is scared of using linux (and like so many others, can't distinguish between Linux and a given GNU tool)? Trust me, HP isn't going to shed any tears in this scenario.

lol... sorry if this sounds like I'm hostile towards you. It is just that I start feeling like Leo Getz (lethal weapon?) everytime I think about this crap.