Earlier this month, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) issued a report meant to clarify licensing issues around the open source software, which lately has been under attack from The SCO Group for alleged copyright infringement.
"Unnecessary fears" about using Linux in Japan-made products could mean a "huge loss of opportunities for the software industry and the government to have access to it, and it would hurt the lives of the people," said the report, which was quoted in Nikkei Electronics News.
The METI report clarifies the GNU Public License (GPL), the rules governing how the software may legally be used and offers definitions of terms in Japanese. There are also comments by experts on how ambiguous areas of the GPL are to be interpreted, said the report.
SCO's campaign has thrown a spanner into Asian Linux efforts. In China, Korea and Japan, the operating system has received government approval and support as it offers a chance for domestic firms to develop products on a platform on a globally understood and adopted platform, yet is free of license fees.
Recently, Matsushita Electric, Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung, Sharp and Toshiba announced the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum, or CELF, a consortium designed to adapt and advance the operating system for use in consumer electronics.
The civil service in China and Japan also announced plans to use more non-Microsoft or Linux software on desktop PCs.
SCO shocked the IT world this year by filing a US$3 billion lawsuit against IBM, claiming that the computing giant illegally incorporated into its Linux software source code from the Unix operating system that SCO controls. SCO then sent letters to 1,500 information technology managers, warning them that any use of Linux could expose them to intellectual property suits.
The company then unveiled a licensing plan for businesses who wish to continue using Linux with SCO's blessing. Rates are comparatively steep--US$1,399 to run Linux on a server with a single CPU and US$32 to use it on an embedded non-PC gadget with computing power.
Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO, traveled to Japan last month to show corporate executives examples of Linux code which he claims contains lines of programming plagiarized from Unix, which SCO owns.
News.com's David Becker contributed to this report.
Play video
SCO said, they had three teams, including a team at MIT examine their "proof" of UNIX code improperly in Linux
1. There appears to be no such team at MIT. And SCO are back tracking on this claim.
www-tech.mit.edu...
2. Here is an example quote SCO made about MIT
www.computerworld.com...
"SCO was able to uncover the alleged violations by hiring three teams of experts, including a group from the MIT math department, to analyze the Linux and Unix source code for similarities. "All three found several instances where our Unix source code had been found in Linux," said a SCO spokesman.
Posted by anonymous on Tuesday, August 26 2003 08:59 AM