SFLC will love the 7th Circuit

[Philippe Verdy]

Chris DiBona [mailto:cdibona at gmail.com] wrote:
> Actually, you're mixing up earth (where the issue is that Richard
> wants the imagery that we ourselves do not own) and the google search
> appliance. I invite you to go mess with the mirror on code.google.com,
> and not confuse the gplv3 and gplv2 wrt replacability.

There was no confusion. What I said was a question (a set of questions in
fact) about this fully proprietary Google box that Google does not want
their customers to look into (that's why it does not want to give the source
and not even any installable binary, or any details about how it is built,
and what it contains; Google says that it contains only material built by
Google, and that he owns all the rights on it). It remains a good question:
which exclusive right is effectively transferred by the sale contract? If
there's no such right, the sale is invalid. If it's a service contract, it
must include an assistance as long as the service is provided...

Now I was not speaking about the code.google.com community network that is
used as a base for open-sourced and free projects. But effectively about the
full proprietary GSA and Mini appliances sold by Google Enterprise (which
implement documented API to the outside, but Google gives no detail about
their internals, and no right to look for that information).
i.e. http://www.google.fr/intl/us/enterprise/intranet_search.html
(and look at the very expensive price for a simple PC in a rack, and that
Google describes as "affordable", "cost effective"). If the data you want to
index merits this price, then it is very precious, and these are good
reasons for requesting details about how the data is used and protected.
This is even more critical for the "Universal" versions of these appliances.

These products also have no trial versions (you must contact Google to
negociate it and sign a contract); you only have a limited 30-day refund
policy after the sale for the Mini.

Google says that it is not available as a software only product (because it
would reduce the TCO, however the price of the integrated hardware is
certainly ridiculous compared to the rest; the software part is sold with
extremely large commercial margins (that go much above the cost of the
included 2 years assistance, 1 year for the Mini)... The assistance is ONLY
by email (no guaranteed delays and no security in emails, each additional
year costs nearly two thirds of the initial price, no phone contact for the
mini, supplement to pay to have phone support on GSA).

Google says that the box runs a modified version of Linux (GPL-licenced),
that it renamed "Google Linux":
http://www.google.com/support/gsa/bin/answer.py?answer=15898&topic=-1

And if you think that the GSA code is open-source (may be it was true) this
is no longer the case (even the distribution mirror for just patches has
been deleted, and there's nothing available on code.google.com for GSA). And
don't expect you'll be able to locate it elsewhere on the net using the
Google search website!