[clug] Re: LUG/SIG contacts (was: "SCO case: Australian LUGs")

[Martin Pool]

On 24 Jun 2003, Leon Brooks <leon at cyberknights.com.au> wrote:

> Would it be more appropriate to treat LA (Linux Australia) as the 
> rendezvous point, the single contact, and rely on them to gather 
> opinion from the LUGs when asked? For example, LA's current treasurer 
> is on countless LUG lists, and would probably know who to ask what and 
> how.

I think that would be easier for the media, and pretty appropriate
given Linux Australia's revitalized role and committee.  It seems to
make a lot of sense for issues like this which are not at all specific
to any city or LUG.  If the journalist just wants to talk to a few
different representative people then I'm sure Pia (the LA president)
could set that up.

Incidentally, I just read a very good interview with Linus in which he
addresses the issues that Sam was apparently trying to cover:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1134271,00.asp

  What is your position on SCO's IP claims and its allegations that
  code from Unix System V like its non-uniform memory access [NUMA]
  technologies have been incorporated into Linux?

    As far as I can tell, SCO doesn't have any IP claims. Their
    lawsuit isn't about IP claims; it's about some contract dispute
    with IBM. The only IP issues they have brought up in a verifiable
    way has been the RCU [Read Copy Update, a way to access data
    structures that may be changing on multiple CPUs with less locking
    than normal] work that IBM did, and that SCO doesn't have any IP
    rights to that I can see: the patents are all IBM, and the code
    was written by (and thus copyrighted by) IBM too. Well, it was
    Sequent at the time, but they're all IBM now.

  SCO alleges that you need to focus more on getting clarification as
  to where the code that goes in the Linux kernel comes from. Do you
  have any plans to change the current Linux development model?

    No. I allege that SCO is full of it, and that the Linux process is
    already the most transparent process in the whole industry. Let's
    face it, nobody else even comes close to being as good at showing
    the evolution and source of every single line of code out
    there. The only party that has had serious problems clarifying
    what they are talking about is SCO, and now when details start
    emerging like with RCU, it's clearly about IP that they had
    nothing to do with, and don't even own. I'm sure that they are
    confident that they own the collective work of Unix, but that's a
    separate thing entirely legally from being the actual copyright
    owner of any specific section of code.

-- 
Martin