Re: Sco vs. IBM

[jdow]

From: "Thorsten Körner" <[e-mail]>

> Hi
> Am Donnerstag, 19. Juni 2003 15:14 schrieb Jesse Pollard:
> > On Thursday 19 June 2003 08:03, Martin List-Petersen wrote:
> > > Citat Magnus Solvang <[e-mail]>:
> > > > Quoting jdow ([e-mail]):
> > > > [...]
> > > >
> > > > | > I believe it's this Norwegian company they write about:
> > > > | >
> > > > | > http://www.trolltech.com/
> > > > |
> > > > | If so then say good by to KDE sometime soon....
> > > >
> > > > How did you arrive at that conclusion? Do you believe that
> > > > SCO will destroy everything and everybody related to Linux
> > > > when they can make money by suing them? :)
> > > > And KDE is not limited to just Linux.
> > >
> > > Go back and read the forbes article. That was more or less exactly the
> > > point of that article.
> >
> > It was the original reason Gnome was started. Trolltec had released
thier
> > toolkit for "free" but not GPL. They then changed the licence a bit, but
I
> > think they still have some (lot?) control over the toolkit. I believe
the
> > KDE group did start a re-work to implement an independant version, but I
> > don't know how that went.
> I think all newer versions of QT are licensed under GPL. And IMHO uses the
> KDE-Project QT-Libs that are 'GPLed', so trolltech can't stop the project
> from using this Libs.

Thorsten, that does not follow directly. You know and I know that when
there is "one way to do something" the code you write and the code I
write without ever meeting each other might have remarkable resemblance
once our preferred formatting differences are ironed out. This has not
stopped SCO from claiming copying by IBM into Linux. (That is a major
laugh, by the way. It is a corporate firing offense.) They can claim
that the KDE people copied code from the QT library rather than fully
and properly recreated it from cold. And who in the KDE world has enough
money to beat someone buying a verdict?

(The word from inside at the coder level of IBM is that you work on
proprietary code or you work on Linux code. Proprietary code does not
leak from one proprietary domain to another or into Linux. It does not
leak the other way. Said leaks are firing offenses. The same happens
at UniSys. My partner has source code for much of XP because he builds
HALs for the ES-7000 etc. He WILL NOT go NEAR the Linux material I
happen to have due to my interests. And I do not discuss any Linux
tricks I note with him. His golden handcuff level income is something
neither of us wish to toss away.)

{^_^} Joanne