Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 16:58:17 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, jasone@canonware.com, smoergrd@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Microsoft's breaches of contract (was: FBSD license and multiple copyright holders) Message-ID: <19980704165817.D358@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199807040703.BAA02533@softweyr.com>; from Wes Peters on Sat, Jul 04, 1998 at 01:03:39AM -0600 References: <rx4ogv71jwn.fsf@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com> <199807040703.BAA02533@softweyr.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Saturday, 4 July 1998 at 1:03:39 -0600, Wes Peters wrote: > My hidden microphone recorded (Dag-Erling Coidan Sm?rgrav) > (smoergrd@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com) saying: > >> Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com> writes: >>> As the standard FBSD license reads, it seems to me that anyone who >>> distributes a binary-only FreeBSD-based product is legally required to >>> print reams of copyright notices in the documentation. That sucks for the >>> distributor and for the customers. >> >> It's there for a reason. I can't understand why UCB hasn't sued the >> pants off Microsoft yet... The monkeys in Redmond are shipping >> software under Berkeley license without including the proper magic >> incantations in their advertising material or documentation. >> >> Wouldn't it be a ball to see Microsoft print "This product includes >> software developed at the University of California, Berkeley" on the >> cover of every single Windows 98 or Windows NT CD? > > You'll find exactly those kinds of copyright notices on the Intel > Internet Station, the little dial-up router I worked on last year. > You find them there, and on the "Legal Stuff" web page in the user > interface, only because I put them into the web page myself, and > raised such a stink about the lack of notices in the documentation > and got the legal department involved, over the strenuous objections > of the doc writer. To their credit, the opinion from the legal > department was rendered in mere hours, and boiled down to "put the > copyright notices into the documentation or don't ship the product." :-) About 2 years ago I did a short contract for Siemens-Nixdorf in Germany. One of the things I did was some modifications to syslogd, and I noticed to my horror that they had removed the copyright. OK, I was supposed to fix it, so I fixed that as well. After I had left, one of my colleagues (Jürgen Krause, one of the authors of the original FreeBSD ISDN package, with whom, just by chance, I was working) called me up and said "Greg, something seems to have gone wrong with your commit. You have the FreeBSD syslogd in there instead". I don't know if it's still in there, or whether they took it out again. > We researched copyright notices as diligently as possible in the > time we had, given that Wind River Systems had removed the original > copyright notices from much of the code, and credited UC Berkely, > CMU, and the ISC. > > Why Microsoft cannot do the same is beyond me. Somebody oughtta > take'em to court. Maybe Scott McNealy would loan us the bucks, > on contingency? ;^) Now if there's one thing that *really* pisses me off, it's that nobody has stopped Microsoft from shipping Internet Exploder because it is in breach of contract. I would have hoped that Sun could say "ship it with correct Java, ship it without Java, or don't ship it". If they can't get that done, I don't see that they can help us in what is primarily a matter of recognition. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980704165817.D358>