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A Website Dedicated to Computer Professional...and some not so Professional |
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How Will SCO Ever Appease
Linux Users
The Santa Cruz
Organization ceased to exist in all but name several years ago, and several
versions of legal entity have since owned the name. The present heir to the
name is "The SCO Group". Darl McBride's
letter was a thinly disguised sandbagging, clearly aimed not at its stated
recipients, but at the corporates that Mr. McBride would love to milk for
some more money. The letter posed as an offer to negotiate ... something or
another, and only made that offer after several paragraphs of special
pleading, and weasel worded accusations, cloaked in SCO's own brand of
torturous legal fright speak. The letter itself, and some of the most
plangent commentary upon it can be found here: http://www.linuxmax.net/news/001225.html.
It is fascinating insight into the mind of SCO. Whatever else it
may have intended, it was a particularly pathetic act of thuggery. It also
perhaps reveals, in part, how history is leaving far behind the old IT
world, based as it is the model of corporate America founded by the likes of
Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. This is a very large line of inquiry I
intend to return to, at another time. Suffice to say that if I were a large
SCO shareholder, I'd be looking for a management team that understood the
dawn of a new era when they saw it . . . like the people at IBM (this time,
anyway). Mr. McBride's
letter referred to the Open Source Community as "counter
cultural". It was a snide, but clever line aimed at the button down
prejudices of the American executive class. And it is precisely what Open
Source is not. Open Source is not an example of the Furry Freak Brothers,
fixed in the amber of geek mythology, who will have to grow up if they want
to produce serious software (a summary of the McBride position). The Open
source phenomenon is not an offshoot of the information technology industry,
rather, the information technology industry is an offshoot of the open
source movement. Unix in particular, was and is a collegiate development.
And it can be argued that the birth of Unix was the birth of modern IT. Unix
can be seen as the single seed that allowed the development of mini and then
micro computers of immense power, using proprietary versions of open source
code as the backbone for all sorts of flavors of commercially available
machinery. And for the record SCO does not, and
never did own, the IP rights to Unix. Unix was not
developed by one person, one team, or one company. It was, and is, the fruit
of a co-operative effort across the computer science departments and
research labs of the world, and it was wide open from the word go. Indeed it
was, an is, a body known as The Open Group, http://www.opengroup.org/,
which rates a new operating system as a *nix flavor. SCO does own some
proprietary rights over one flavor of Unix, that known as System V. System V
contains many thousands of lines of code which were borrowed from preceding
Unix developments, and, as time went on, other lines borrowed from
succeeding developments by other, non SCO software writers. The
"official" Open source community response can be found here http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/mcbride2.html
. A few days ago, it appears, Linus Torvald decided to reply to Mr. McBride: *** "Open letter to Darl McBride -- please
grow up." Dear Darl, Thank you so much for your letter. We are happy that
you agree that customers need to know that Open Source is legal and stable,
and we heartily agree with that sentence of your letter. The others don't
seem to make as much sense, but we find the dialogue refreshing. However, we
have to sadly decline taking business model advice from a company that seems
to have squandered all its money (that it made off a Linux IPO, I might add,
since there's a nice bit of irony there), and now seems to play the US legal
system as a lottery. We in the Open Source group continue to believe in
technology as a way of driving customer interest and demand. Also, we find
your references to a negotiating table somewhat confusing, since there
doesn't seem to be anything to negotiate about. SCO has yet to show any
infringing IP in the Open Source domain, but we wait with bated breath for
when you will actually care to inform us about what you are blathering
about. All of our source
code is out in the open, and we welcome you point to any
particular piece you might disagree with. Until then, please accept our
gratitude for your submission, Yours truly, *** It is a model of the sort
of polite restraint one has come to expect of the man, and respect him for.
And somewhere on an open source blog, this: "Open source
is not about a business model that monetizes the IP that has been donated by
means of public license. Open Source is a sharing of knowledge in the art
and science of computers. Many companies have embraced the Open Source
philosophy with varying degrees of success. The Open Source movement is not
a business model; it is a principle of sharing knowledge in the field of
computing that all may enjoy the benefits of the knowledge. As a company
that was built and generated profit from the use of Open Source software,
the SCO Group has deliberately disavowed its own history to attack Open
Source." It's all history, you see. When it became evident that there
were several gold mines to be exploited in the business of bits and bytes,
then the people who had been selling aluminum siding in the fifties, used
cars in the sixties and time share in the seventies climbed on the computing
bandwagon. They put their arms around the shoulders of these thick leased,
bespectacled young spotty-faces who had written what was not so much a
computer program as a meal ticket, and they explained what a
"manager" really does. Well, as I get
older, I get more tired, and too tired to carefully unravel and expose all
the greed, stupidity and cupidity in the world's litany of lost great
opportunities. Mr. McBride is obviously well under way to lose one for The SCO Group, and all I can think to advise him is: There must be a house out
there somewhere that desperately needs some siding, why not get on with it? TedDoyle@TheNetworkAdministrator.com Disclaimer: The Opinions shared on TheNetworkAdministrator.com are contributed by its readers and does not express the opinion of the creators of this publication. |
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The
last dying, gasping struggles of a big smelly blow fish expiring on the
dock. That is the image conjured by an "open letter" from the CEO
of The SCO Group, Darl McBride, a few days ago, and the latest event in the
continuing fiasco of SCO versus Linux, IBM, SUN and the world, really.