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Linus to SCO: 'Please Grow Up'
brakk writes "From this article at Infoworld, Linus responds to SCO's open letter in a manner reminiscent of patting a child on the head." chrisd notes that his company is making SCO employees unhireable.
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Another relatively uninteresting open letter, however this part of the submission caught my eye:
chrisd notes that his company is making SCO employees unhireable.
[from that link]:
Any resumes which include the Santa Cruz Operation after May of 2003 will be immediately deleted as well.
That is truly childish. The real assholes at SCO are the suits and money-grubbing lawyers responsible for this charade. A code monkey in the trenches who needs a job to pay the bills isn't necessarily an enemy of open source.
Guilt by association is a slippery slope, remember Joe McCarthy?
Trolling is a art,
Come one people only the current top management of SCOX and Canopy are responsible and should be held accountable..
However, with the laying off of most of the r&d coders is there any one left that is accoutnable in nature?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
That's capricious and sick. It is not the rank and file who is responsible, it is the brass. To punish people who have done nothing wrong, guilt by association, is cruel and unfair. This would be like throwing an Enron middle-level mananger in prison simply because he/she worked for Enron. SCO isn't Nazi Germany, people!
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I suspect that the reason that Damage is refusing to hire ex-SCO employees is to prevent any possible legal action on SCO's part - I would not put it past SCO to sue a new employer for misappropriation of trade secrets or any number of other things, given their track record. I really don't think it's a political statement at all.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Hey Chrisd,
You can't seriously claim to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and at the same time reject applicants based on where they used to work. I know there's not a law but come on, that's the spirit of EOE.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
That's whats so funny about this. If the linux community has this infringed code in it's source, then everyone can see it anyhow. So why would SCO want people to sign an NDA to see code that they allready can see?
Just point to the infringing code in the linux source...
Gibble: Descriptive of an emotional state in which one's mind is scrabbling for some purchase on reality
Mr. Codemonkey has been submitting resumes without success?
If they're applying for a job at a Linux company, shouldn't it be painfully fucking obvious that they're TRYING TO JUMP SHIP?
Why benefit SCO by making it *HARDER* for their employees to jump ship?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Linus' letter reminds me of a good example of a flame: biting, yet so intelligently written that you might miss it.
And their first task will be going through the SCO customer list in my geographic area and whacking each and every SCO system they can locate.
You have to view it from their perspective - years, some times decades of hard work, stock in the company trapped by trading rules, and scam artists from Canopy making it all just a sick joke.
If you really want to jab SCO, find a job for *every* person there who does real work, and do it quick.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Preventing an SCO employee from jumping ship by denying them a job opportunity *benefits SCO*.
Although a poster below made a good point - This could be intentional to avoid intellectual property problems. SCO noncompete agreements might likely make their employees ineligible to apply for employment at ChrisD's company in the first place.
That said, the wording of the statement on ChrisD's website is immature and vengeful.
More proper wording which I would accept is, "Due to intellectual property issues and conflicts of interest, we regret that we cannot hire former employees of the Santa Cruz Operation at this time."
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Which one is worse, the fool or the fool that follows him?
I find the attention/flames that everybody is giving to SCO highly surprising, as a result it is hard for bystanders to differentiate between the opponents. It would be much more mature of Linus and Co to either ignore the whole matter or respond professionally, instead of playing the same game.
When men used to be men
Look, the IT market is going to shit so fast it seems like diareah (sp?) and you're pissed at folks not wanting to abandon their already shrinking job market because of some stupid political stand?
Try explaining to your kids why you can't buy them food or pay for their school or why the lights just got shut off. An answer of "Oh well I had to make sure my stance on ensuring the freedom of Linux and GPL software everywhere was loud and clear. Sorry you feel faint from hunger but hey at least my startling irrelevant opinions on the computer industry's morality remain untarnished!"
I mean are you on 100% Genetically Enhanced Columbian Crack Cocaine? Janitors and receptionists? WTF would they care about Linux at all for? Its just a job for them. Most likely they aren't even AWARE of anything other than windows (I'll bet you $5 the receptionists at SCO or even Red Hat have Windows based PC's on their desks). This isn't the civil rights movement were talking about here. A LITTLE bit of perspective would do you a world of good.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
...clever comebacks and snide remarks make little difference for corporate execs and lawyers keeping an eye on this case.
While Torvalds is a Linux-figurehead, he's still a techie - which means his commentary will be drowned out by the SCO lawyers, CEO and PR drones babbling on. While /. won't listen to them, I fear the ignorant public (investors, analysts, lawyers, execs) will get a one-sided view as long as only SCO official representatives and Linux techies exchange rounds with these statements in front of the press. IBM won't comment since they're in legal proceedings, but where are all the rest?
I think the responses should continue for two reasons:
1) While some people have become bored of the rhetoric, I am still enjoying the responses from the OSS leaders and representatives.
2) There are many people out there who on occasion happen to read an article about the SCO debate. If the response from the community is to stay silent then the masses will presume that all McBride says is true. Granted you may not care what the rest of the world thinks of you, however, as an OSS advocate I for one become angry when I'm portrayed as a commie, thief, drug addict, etc, etc.
I say keep the rebuttals coming.
burnin
There is a place for apolitical techies like Linus and another place for visionaries and advocates like Stallman and Perens. This may be news to you, but code doesn't just float in the void; without the right legal and social environment OSS doesn't exist. It's fine for Linus to ignore SCO -- that's not his job to deal with it -- but if everyone ignored it we'd all be up shit creek when SCO walked out of some courtroom with legal rights to our code.
For a non-native English speaker, Linus needs to be given credit for the subtle zinger at the end: "Until then, please accept our gratitude for your submission,". Nice double meaning on that last word there!
This might not be (just) about being against SCOs ethics - given Darl's track record, there might be a very real possibility that if someone hires one of "his" people, he could come after that company and somehow claim that they have stolen "his" property (the intellectual property inside that person's head).
Problem with SCO is that since nothing they're doing makes sense, predicting future moves is equally difficult.
For your information, there was a time when i lived on the streets of southern california and did feel hunger so yes i know what i speak about. And yes it was a result of my refusal to Compromise. Now that i am doing well, i cherish the memory that i didn't. Would i take it back? never. There may be very few things in this world worth dying for, but i beleive self integrity is one of them.
Look at you, all principled and what-not. It's easy to talk big. When you're looking down the barrell of sudden unemployment in a tight market at your own hand it's a potentially harmful tipping point for your career and those you love. See if your wife cares about your principles when you're missing your second mortgage payment in a row and you can't look your son in the eye because you can't afford your new eyeglasses prescription...
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
This is so beautiful because it so totally destroys SCO's "reason" for not disclosing the infringing code: the argument that they can't disclose it becauses it's proprietary (even though, by their own statements, it's already in the publicly available kernel source code).
Characteristically, Linus curts stright to the crux of the matter.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Drill baby drill - on Mars
You have NO idea how happy I am to be working. I know people who are graduating IST/CS right now and have NOTHING but 50k-70k in loans. I can tell you right now that even the most moral of them will BEG for a job at SCO, right wrong be damned. You wouldn't be so sure about "doing the right thing" when your car got repoed and you filed for bancrupcy..
And they are absolute fools. Trust me, I have learned this the hard way. You do not want to take a bad job just so you can have one. It is bad for you, your career, and your self-esteem. It is never worth it. Yes, they feel like begging SCO for a job now, and I feel their pain. But they will thank themselves a couple years from now if they don't do it.
Besides, it is ridiculous to work at a job you hate, or for a company you cannot believe in, for any reason. I have generally chosen companies based on agreeing with their moral stance and their product, and this has turned out best for me. YMMV, but realize that if you hate your job you will not do a good job, and not doing a good job will not help your career at all. Working at a job you hate, for a company you hate, is not good for your health, self-esteem, or career. It is the stupidest thing you can do, regardless of the rationalizations you try to make for it.
-Hope
That SCO is so full of bullshit that by repeating and denying any particular version of their fantasy-land claims, we only give credence to them. This is the letter than ESM and Bruce should have written. Short, to the point, and utterly dismissive.
But it could be even better. I hope that from now on, if open/free advocates decide to bite Darl's trolling, that they restrain themselves to just saying "Identify the infringing source," and not one word more. Unless it's "fuckwad".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"So when do you draw the line? What if your company was making dangerous chemicals and not disposing of them properly? What if they were making chemical weapons? What if they were selling chemical weapons to terrorists?"
The point some of the above posters have made is that you can't draw the line, if people like chrisd will find you guilty by association. If more companies did what chrisd did, then SCO employees CAN'T jump ship, even if they want to.
Why help SCO? What you SHOULD be doing is giving SCO employees INCENTIVES to leave!!!!
Actualy, I have more respect for my father because he quit working a temp job at an electronics store (he had previously been fired) because the owner had questionable business practices. Never mind that he was unemployed for 6 months after that and we had to be very tight with money. I hav a hell of a lot fo respect for him for doing what he did.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984