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Today I talked about the General Public Licence, one of the ways in which software is licensed. It’s very important for several reasons, and it’s controversial because some software companies see it as a threat to their ways of doing business. Others see it as essential. My notes are below, and some links are at the end.
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SCO has lost its legal battle to charge people for using other people’s work. You can read all about it at Groklaw. Briefly, SCO asserted that a) it owned Unix, b) Linux was illegally copied from Unix, and c) everyone using Linux therefore owed it licence fees. A few companies paid – most just ignored the demands. SCO sued some major Linux users including IBM, then Novell stood up and said we own Unix, SCO doesn’t, and we have no problem at all with Linux. SCO sued Novell and has just lost. It will therefore lose to IBM and the others in very short order as the basis of its claim has been overturned. SCO will be liable for the licence fees it has already collected, and possibly damages, not to mention huge legal fees. A longer and better description of the whole process is on Wikipedia.

This is important because SCO’s whole legal challenge has been seen as a deliberate and cynical attempt to scare people off open source. Proprietary software companies (you know who I mean) have been portraying the SCO action as a reason not to use Linux, after all, they say, how can you be sure you won’t be sued? They can’t do that any more.

The Internet has expanded, seemingly from nowhere, to become an essential part of modern living for people in developed countries over the space of only a decade or so. That’s faster than the telephone system was rolled out, faster than electric power, even faster than mobiles. What has driven this extraordinary growth? I give my ideas below, and as always there are some links at the end.

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