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Groklaw Sends A Dear Darl Letter
Ralph Yarro writes "The Inquirer is carrying the text of an open letter sent to Darl McBride from members of the open source community at Groklaw. This is a lengthy and detailed response to the open letter Darl sent a while back."
Everyone who is concerned about this issue should read this letter, they're really giving the GPL some shark's teeth.
On a more serious note, maybe this is what it takes to get some real "street cred" for Free SW/Open Source among Corporate Amerika. It's just a bummer for me that things have to go *that* far in the 1st place.
C|N>K
Your company's website does almost nothing to explain what it is your company does. Did you use some sort of automatic business phrase generation program to create it?
"A dynamic operating company"
What the hell does that mean?
My real curiosity is how people's attitudes or feelings would change (or not change) if it turns out SCO is right (however unlikely that is).
Why should anyone's attitude toward SCO change? It has been pointed out repeatedly that if IBM did a no-no, then SCO will get damages (be paid for their IP, ha ha), and the offending code would be removed from the kernel because it violates the GPL (not because we would have to).
SCO has no right to claim ownership of Linux in any case, nor to charge Linux users license fees. What they are doing is thinly veiled extortion. Why on earth would I change my opinion of them?
Even if they were right, I would still feel contempt for the way that they have mannered themselves. If they are right, and they have known for a year that Linux had offending code, they still did nothing to mitigate the damages done to their company. I feel the company is obviously damaged anyways; anyone who read their 10Q knows it to be true. If there were offending code in Linux, it is being made a scapegoat for the failing business that is SCO.
Is SCO right? Only time will tell. When they begin to attempt the extortion of Linux users and companies next month, the backlash will start a series of actions that will have some finality to this matter. And from that point forward, Linux will either repair, remove, and move on, or Linux users of the world will laugh SCO right out of the stock market and the IT world.
For me, I don't care which happens as long as this is over. Neither outcome will affect me personally. Worst case scenario, my kernel is illegal and I fix it myself or download a patched kernel. Could I continue using a bad kernel without getting caught?
Probably. But I won't. I, like most other Linux users, take pride in OSS.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Even at $19, SCOX is trading at a market cap of only $250 million. Even if we assume that the only thing of value is the company's possible billion dollar bonanza from IBM, this would hint that the market is pricing in only a 25% possibility of winning.
The thing is, its not a matter of whose really right or wrong here, because its entirely possible the court system could 'get it wrong'. Even if we all agree that SCO is 100% in the wrong here and has no possible evidence at all, I wouldn't want to bet that a jury would find the same way.
Thank you for writing a coherent, polite and clear response to SCO. I believe that your methods will get us faster and better results than the usual loose cannons.
-- $G