Sour grapes from Kevin Carmony to Linspire…but is Kevin a good guy?
I’d like to think that Kevin Carmony really believed anything he said about Ubuntu being this really great distribution, but the more I look at what he’s said and done in the past (at Linspire), I come to find myself seriously doubting that, I’m goign to go over a few of the things he said while working at Linspire that really angered me, and of course source them at the end.
…some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the “morale high ground” by refusing to give into “Microsoft threats,” while openly promoting the means of circumventing proprietary software on their web sites, amounting to nothing more than high-brow software piracy.
This is soo much crap it’s not even funny.
Notice he doesn’t actually say what he thinks is “illegal distribution”, and his logic also fails to account for clean room reverse engineering for compatibility, which is in fact allowed by US copyright law, and explicitly PERMITTED by the much hated DMCA.
Furthermore a lot of the proprietary software he’s talking about actually has redistribution rights granted by the owner (Java, Flash, etc.) meaning that anyone can use it, and the only reason Fedora and Ubuntu don’t include them by default is because they really hate proprietary software.
And it’s worth noting that replacements for both exist, called IcedTea which provides full JAVA 6 compatiblity, and Swfdec which while still in development and full of bugs, will give you access to Youtube and most flash video and animation sites.
As for codecs, again this is a clean room reverse engineering job which allows you to play back proprietary video formats or transcode your data, also known as “breaking it out of jail”, I don’t see anything which infringes or actually encourages you to encode to their formats, you can encode to proprietary formats if you really want to work at it, but why?
Further, US patent law says that for a patent to be enforceable in court, the holder of that patent must work diligently to protect it, and seeing as how Linux users have been using these formats for several years, I think the precedent is on our side, add that to the fact that the patents on MP3 are fragmented and companies like Thomson and Fruenhofer have been too busy fighting each other over the years to worry about LameMP3, I think we’re pretty safe.
LibDVDCSS doesn’t actually crack the copy protection on DVD movies, the weak cipher (40-bit ARC4) was meant to stop DVD players from coming out that hadn’t paid money to the DVD Forum, DeCSS and LibDVDCSS are different projects entirely, DeCSS copied the authorization code from a particular player, LibDVDCSS generates a list of possible keys and tries them until one works, then proceeds to allow your disc to play.
As far as Microsoft Office and .Net, Microsoft has not only issued a “patent convenant” (as well as the specifications for all their formats), but has gotten a lot of this stuff registered as ISO and ECMA standards, so it would be fairly hard for them to go back on their word now even if they wanted to.
So why don’t Ubuntu and Fedora and (insert distro here) have all that?
Because there is no point in sticking their neck out over an operating system they give away freely, no matter how little the risk.
With Fedora, you can use Livna or AtRPMs to get all this stuff, and with Ubuntu you have Restricted Driver Manager and the ubuntu-restricted-extras package ,remember that they can use the excuse that not all countries have the same laws and by taking a copy, you’re to blame if any trouble comes up (it won’t, and they can’t prove you’re using their stupid mp3 format).
But Carmony’s accusations that everyone that isn’t using Linspire is a software “pirate” is still quite amusing, especially now that after saying in that article that he also “prefered Linspire”, I mean he was obliged to say some of this stuff at the time cause he worked for them and had to say it, I do wonder how much of it was actually him though.
In a video conference with Chris Pirillo he said he used Ubuntu because when he was working at Linspire he was kind of obligated to use their stuff, but then “I got out and started looking aorund”.
I’d like to attribute all that silliness to Linspire using him as their puppet…but maybe you shouldn’t trust anything else this guy does? Will waffle for cash? He admits that he uses Ubuntu, this “high brow pirate” (his words) OS now too.
To be honest, no matter how bad Carmony is, Robertson looks to be 10 times worse, and for those that haven’t been watching, Michael Robertson overthrew the board of directors and sold the company to Xandros just lately, so they have 1 employee at Linspire, Michael Robertson.
Linspire’s website is still up and it looks like they’d still love to see your money though . :P
Kevin Carmony’s last newsletter as Linspire CEO – June 27, 2007
Well, unless we really know Kevin in person, of course we can’t know who the real Carmony is. But I would definitely take his remarks about Linspire post-leaving-the-company more seriously than the remarks he made while he was still working there.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so let’s hope that Kevin has realized the error of his ways and is willing to look fickle or self-contradictory in order to finally embrace the truth. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Comment by ubuntucat — July 7, 2008 @ 8:42 pm
I believe you’re wrong about patents. They do not have to be rigorously defended to remain valid – that’s only true of trademarks. You can *try* to raise a defense of laches for some patents, but you’d be hard pressed to do that for the codecs you’ve mentioned, since the patent owners have not been “sleeping on their rights” – they’ve been quite vocal about their patent rights, and have actively licensed them.
There have been several recent cases of patent trolls pulling up some pretty dusty (but still “valid”) patents and successfully asserting them. For instance, Wi-lan has recently asserted patents that cover all Wifi devices, and is currently suing about a dozen companies, and has successfully settled with dozens more, including Cisco and Nokia – all for something that’s an IEEE standard.
Even though the DMCA would seem to allow for reverse-engineering for interoperability, so far it appears that that’s not the case when it comes to circumvention of access control devices. In particular, nobody’s won a case over DeCSS on the basis of interoperability.
Comment by Duane Maxwell — July 8, 2008 @ 12:33 am
Duane: US credit law says that they have to wipe stuff off your credit report after seven years, this doesn’t stop companies that buy up junk debt for pennies on the dollar and then call the person up and threaten them (usually illegally threaten them) if they don’t pay back their credit card bills from say, 1980.
Is there a valid debt? Yes. Is there anything they can legally do to damage your credit report or sue you if you don’t pay them? No.
Patents work somewhat like this, that you have to assert yourself or face having a precedent that you’ve let everyone and his mother come along and use it.
Naturally a lot of this is up to the judge and/or jury presiding over the lawsuit, and so these “trolls” come up and attack companies in court, and even though there’s no good reason they *should* win, they know that some of their victims will be cowed into paying.
As for DeCSS, I already said that the reason that is illegal is not because of what it does, but how it does it, it took a authorization key from a validly licensed product, and used it, where Libdvdcss generates lists of possible keys, it’s somewhat controversial, but they haven’t actually ripped anything off from anyone, and there are valid reasons (other than dumping DVDs to your hard disk), that you’ll want to have it, it also allows you to make personal backups, which you as the owner of the disc have a right to.
I think that if anyone really had anything on Linux, Microsoft especially, they’d tell what was being infringed on and wave it around going “Nyaaaaaa!”, SCO and Microsoft’s attacks amount to “You know what you took and we’re not going to tell you”, and thats exactly why SCO got thrown out of the court, they had nothing, and they ruined themselves with that suit.
Comment by izanbardprince — July 8, 2008 @ 1:26 am