[Discussioni] Nmap terminates SCO's license

[Daniele Pala]

Nmap terminates SCO's license 

When Nmap 3.5 was released, the following
paragraph was included in the Release Notes:

SCO Corporation of Lindon, Utah (formerly Caldera) has lately taken to
an extortion campaign of demanding license fees from Linux users for
code that they themselves knowingly distributed under the terms of the
GNU GPL. They have also refused to accept the GPL, claiming that some
preposterous theory of theirs makes it invalid (and even
unconstitutional)! Meanwhile they have distributed GPL-licensed Nmap in
(at least) their "Supplemental Open Source CD". In response to these
blatant violations, and in accordance with section 4 of the GPL, we
hereby terminate SCO's rights to redistribute any versions of Nmap in
any of their products, including (without limitation) OpenLinux,
Skunkware, OpenServer, and UNIXWare. We have also stopped supporting the
OpenServer and UNIXWare platforms.

As you might expect, news of that termination of rights for SCO resulted
in major posting activity on two of the Web's most popular sites for
geeks, Slashdot and Groklaw. I asked Fyodor by email what sort of
feedback he received about the issue. He replied:

Many posters suggested good angles for pursuing this and found damning
SCO court filings, such as their claim in the IBM suit that "The General
Public License ("GPL") is unenforceable, void and/or voidable." If they
don't accept the GPL, then they have no right to redistribute Nmap. And
to claim that the GPL is invalid in the IBM case while arguing that it
gives them valid rights to distribute Nmap would not only expose their
hypocrisy but also leaves them vulnerable to equitable estoppel claims.
Of course IANAL.

As it stands, SCO has ceased distribution of Nmap from some of their
sites, but it is still available from ftp.iso.caldera.com. I am
evaluating my legal options.

Refusing to support SCO systems has also been successful. I have
convinced several people who have written me with UNIXWare/OpenServer
issues to try Nmap on Linux instead.

All of the email responses to these actions have been positive, except
for one person who questioned rather the move is in compliance with the
Open Source Definition.

Fyodor went on in his response to point out that Eric Raymond replied to
that question of whether or not excluding SCO was a violation of
Paragraph 5 of the Open Source Definition by saying:

The answer is no. OSD Clause 5 is intended to prevent discriminatory
clauses from being written into licenses, not to prevent the enforcement
of non-discriminatory licenses."