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The power base of Linux

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 22 Jan 2004 10:35 GMT

The legal defence fund that you announced -- that came out of the customer group?
The customer council originally gave us the idea for it. They saw a lot of press coming from SCO and then their continuing threats of suing an end user. The customer council thought it was something that we ought to do in order to provide peace of mind for C-level executives at big, medium-sized and small companies that were trying to determine what they should do with Linux. They should feel comfortable continuing and starting to deploy Linux solutions.

And what is the criterion by which you'll select who gets that money? Obviously, it would involve somebody who is the target of litigation from SCO, but what other factors are involved?
We are just in the midst of finalising the criteria. That will be reviewed and approved at our upcoming board meeting, but we will have a subcommittee of our board of directors that will have a specific set of criteria that they will use for dispersing the funds.

There is a lot more interest these days in providing some formal protection for people who develop or use Linux. What led to that change of heart over the last six months?
While [customer] interest and momentum is high, and the acceleration is rapid, the threats from SCO that they are going to sue people has got people wondering. While it hasn't affected the deployment or the exhilaration of Linux, we thought that it was important that we put the legal defence fund in place to provide peace of mind, just like we did with the white papers and other information that we put out earlier this year; just like we have done with the Linux development process chart that we published.

One of the criticisms from the SCO Group about Linux is that there has been very little vetting of the code -- somebody has not been around to review it to make sure that it didn't violate somebody's patents here, somebody's copyrights there. Does OSDL think that criticism has merit?
The Linux development process has been around for more than 10 years. It is obviously very open. The code is made readily available to members of the community. The subsystem maintainers play a key role in looking at that code and evaluating that code. Everybody looks at it, everybody evaluates it, everybody criticises it, and then, when the subsystem maintainers are comfortable, they send the code to Linus or to Andrew Morton, and once again, they go through the very public process of the code [review]. So there is no way that code comes in from the side that nobody sees that ends up in the kernel.

But do you believe that there is any need for changing it to put in some explicit code review for potential legal violations?
There are always things that you can do to make the process better, but it has really stood the test of time. We don't believe that there is anything [infringing] there, and if there is, we would like to have that code made available to us. We would evaluate it, and if it were offending, we would surgically remove it, and we would replace it with new code. But we have not been given that opportunity, because we have not seen what that code is that they allude to.