The real problem with Blair

The reason many of us are so enraged about Tony Blair’s dissembling over Iraq is that it threatens to destroy confidence in what is otherwise — in an imperfect world — quite a good government (and certainly the best likely to be available to the UK electorate for quite a while). If you look across the policy spectrum — on education, health, the environment, for example — what you see is a government doing good stuff and trying to tackle the legacy of three decades’ of Tory neglect and incompetence. (Security and civil liberties are a different matter, alas.) And yet many of us who think like this are so angry about Blair’s dishonesty over Iraq that we are contemplating voting against Labour in the next election. The Guardian‘s Madelaine Bunting got it right in an excellent column yesterday: the right solution is for Blair to stand down (and pay the price for his Iraq adventure), leaving Gordon Brown (who is relatively untainted over the war) to lead the party into the next election.

Don’t look at escaped Microsoft code — smart legal advice

Linux Journal has some good advice for anyone involved with Open Source software development.

As a reminder to our readers, we are repeating the same advice we published in 2000, the last time Microsoft’s source code was compromised. Don’t look at it or you could contaminate yourself legally.

The Wall Street Journal reported today [October 27, 2000 — Ed.] that Microsoft and the FBI are investigating an intrusion in which unknown attackers had access to Microsoft source code for three months. Although nothing purporting to be Microsoft source code copied in the intrusion has surfaced yet, any such code poses a legal risk to people who read it and to any free software project that accepts contributions from those people.

“Anybody who wishes to be involved in free software should have nothing to do with anything claiming to be Microsoft source code released without license or in any informal way,” said Eben Moglen, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation and professor of law and legal history at Columbia University. Microsoft, he said, would be in a position to seek damages from anyone trafficking in misappropriated trade secrets, which can include merely reading the Microsoft code and then contributing to a free project.

If offered any code that implements Microsoft-like APIs, or uses Microsoft’s file formats or protocols, the FSF will go beyond its normal legal paperwork to make sure that the contributor has not had contact with Microsoft’s proprietary information. “We would certainly take additional measures to prove the absence of any relationship between developers and Microsoft’s trade secrets,” Moglen said.

Free software developers are already careful to keep themselves insulated from any contact with proprietary information. Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers on the Samba project, said that his response to one anonymous offer of Windows NT source code was, “You’re offering to end my career. Thanks but no thanks.” And the Samba team, he said, will refuse to work with anyone who has seen Microsoft’s proprietary code. “Anything we do has to be completely legal,” he said. “There are plenty of people who can work on it who haven’t seen Microsoft source code.” His advice to anyone planning to write free software in the future is, “Stay away from [proprietary Microsoft source code] at all costs.”

“Microsoft Tries to Settle European Union Case”

Thus the headline on a NYT report. On further investigation, it turns out that all Microsoft are offering to do is to include rival software (e.g. RealPlayer) on a CD, while leaving all their stuff pre-installed on the hard drive. This, apparently, is their idea of an attempt to settle with the European Commission!