Thread: N950 with MeeGo this year, but who trusts Nokia anymore?
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wmarone is offline wmarone
2011-03-04 , 22:21
Posts: 1,746 | Thanked: 2,100 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#261
Originally Posted by GeraldKo View Post
Despite having been a lawyer (with only limited work in intellectual property), I've never understood quite how the Open Source license works. For example, I don't get how Android can be based on a Linux core and nonetheless have closed source aspects.
First, which open source license? There's a lot, like the BSD, the Apache license, and the GPLv2/GPLv3/LGPL/AGPLv3, etc.

Now, despite what Microsoft has said, the GPL is not "viral." It does not surreptitiously infect adjacent software. Libraries like glibc are LGPL, which don't require software that link against them to be GPL. It is entirely possible, legally, to run proprietary software on top of Linux (whether just the core, or a full GNU/Linux system.)

In this paranoid state, I further wonder whether Nokia can use its retained programmers to develop MeeGo-oriented software, and then kill it with copyrights/patents so that critical parts of a future MeeGo OS would be crippled by making them proprietary, unused, and unusable.*
Firing such a salvo would be attacking every company that uses Linux in its business, which hits companies like IBM, Oracle, Redhat, Sony, and more. More than a few would step up in its defense and it's why Microsoft relies mostly on FUD and indirect attacks.


*I've long wondered whether Microsoft had a secret agreement with NetManage (and thereby with its successor companies) to keep EccoPro out of development. EccoPro is a very powerful PIM (with many unusual capabilities, such that Personal Information Manager doesn't really encompass all it can do) that still has a following, even though it's had no development since 1997. NetManage acquired EccoPro in mid-1997 and immediately stopped all further development of it. Numerous people tried to buy EccoPro from NetManage, even as recently as the last couple years, but NetManage wouldn't sell it or open the code, even though it gets no income from the product. The only beneficiaries of NetManage's refusal that I can think of are other PIM vendors, like Microsoft, which sells its much-inferior Outlook.
Microsoft has tried dirty tricks before, yes, but the problem for them with Linux, and the reason they hate it and open source so terribly, is that there's no one company you can buy, no one developer you can pay off to kill it. Once something is released under the GPL, it can never truly be taken proprietary again. On top of that, software patents have no teeth in Europe and have no known teeth (or would be ill enforced) in regions like Asia.
Last edited by wmarone; 2011-03-04 at 22:24.
 

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