Re: Never ever use word BitKeeper if Larry does not like you

Tom Sightler
2003-03-14T16:36:11Z

On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 10:29, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > we'd all be happy and could go back to sleep ?
>
> Nice try. Let's try again (and we'll keep on trying until you do it)
>
> "Red Cap: a proprietary Red Hat clone"
> "The goal of this system is to produce a system compatible with Red Hat"
>
> Are your lawyers happy with that? You said, with respect to my mail,
> "When you are dealing with someone apparently being a corporate bully".
>
> The point is to clarify what is acceptable corporate behaviour and what
> is not. The benchmark is "what would Red Hat do" or "what would SuSE do".
> If they would handle it differently, I'll be happy to follow their lead.
>
> I put the statements into a clear framing of the Red Hat context and
> I'll keep doing it until you go ask the question of your lawyers.
> I'm asking you again, would Red Hat behave any differently?

Since I have nothing to do with Redhat I'm not sure what their lawyers
might say, but what about Microsoft lawyers? Microsoft has already
shown their willingness to pursue such cases (can anyone say Lindows?)
but I haven't seen their lawyers attack WINE, even though their stated
goal is "Wine is an implementation of the Windows Win32 and Win16 APIs
on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer."
They sure are using the Windows name in claiming compatibility.

So are you exhibiting worse corporate behavior than Microsoft? It would
seem so. Do you think Redhat or SuSE would be worse? Maybe, but that
doesn't make it right.

Later,
Tom