Richard M. Stallman: GNU's not Linux

Posted on 26 Jun 2003 at 12:24

In the hands of a propagandist for increased copyright or patent powers, the term is a way to prevent clear thinking. In the hands of someone making threats, the term is a tool for obfuscation: "We claim we can sue you over something, but we won't say what it is."

In an actual lawsuit, such ambiguity would make their case fail, or even prevent it from getting off the ground. If, however, SCO's aim is to shake the tree and see if any money falls down, or simply to spread fear, they may regard vagueness and mystery as advantageous.

I cannot prognosticate about the SCO vs IBM lawsuit itself: I don't know what was in their contract, I don't know what IBM did, and I am not a lawyer. The Free Software Foundation's lawyer, Professor Moglen, believes that SCO gave permission for the community's use of the code that they distributed under the GNU GPL and other free software licenses in their version of GNU/Linux.

However, I can address the broader issue of such situations. In a community of over half a million developers, we can hardly expect that there will never be plagiarism. But it is no disaster; we discard that material and move on. If there is material in Linux that was contributed without legal authorization, the Linux developers will learn what it is and replace it. SCO cannot use its copyrights, or its contracts with specific parties, to suppress the lawful contributions of thousands of others. Linux itself is no longer essential: the GNU system became popular in conjunction with Linux, but today it also runs with two BSD kernels and the GNU kernel. Our community cannot be defeated by this.

Copyright 2003 Richard Stallman. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.

Richard M. Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation and author of the GNU General Public License .

Author: Richard M. Stallman