As is said of academic politics: the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.[1]
Back at the dawn of the dot-com age, just as Linux was starting to boom, and the first IPOs (Red Hat, VA Linux) were occurring, a company appeared out of nowhere^WReno, Nevada (same thing), called "Linux One", claiming to have their own novel Linux distro. Oh, and plans for its own IPO.
It proved to be little more than a search-and-replace of "Red Hat" with "Linux one", though there were also some contributions from MandrakeSoft, another distro at the time. Stealing is copying from one source, curation is copying from several....
The thing is that, at least so far as the software is concerned, that's pretty much perfectly kosher under the GNU GPL and other Free Software / Open Source licences which comprised the scope of Red Hat's offering. In terms of copyright and licensing ... there was nothing actually wrong with this. Skeevy as all getout, yes. But not a GPL (or BSD, or MIT, or Apache, or ...) violation. (The company may have failed its source provision obligations for the GPL, however.)
The robustness of the IPO failing, er, filing, might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere though. I seem to recall it being cancelled rather quietly, there's
As is said of academic politics: the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.[1]
Back at the dawn of the dot-com age, just as Linux was starting to boom, and the first IPOs (Red Hat, VA Linux) were occurring, a company appeared out of nowhere^WReno, Nevada (same thing), called "Linux One", claiming to have their own novel Linux distro. Oh, and plans for its own IPO.
It proved to be little more than a search-and-replace of "Red Hat" with "Linux one", though there were also some contributions from MandrakeSoft, another distro at the time. Stealing is copying from one source, curation is copying from several....
The thing is that, at least so far as the software is concerned, that's pretty much perfectly kosher under the GNU GPL and other Free Software / Open Source licences which comprised the scope of Red Hat's offering. In terms of copyright and licensing ... there was nothing actually wrong with this. Skeevy as all getout, yes. But not a GPL (or BSD, or MIT, or Apache, or ...) violation. (The company may have failed its source provision obligations for the GPL, however.)
The robustness of the IPO failing, er, filing, might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere though. I seem to recall it being cancelled rather quietly, there's
The Register published an investigation of the episode at the time: https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/02/linuxone_takes_more_t...
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Notes:
1. See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/