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Bob Young's Open Letter to SCO/Darl McBride
Oskie-wee-wee writes "Infoworld is carrying a story about Bob Young (Red Hat, Lulu, Classy Formal Wear, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, etc.) and his open letter to SCO and Darl McBride - in response to Darl's open letter 'defending, in one breath, the SCO suit, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and the Supreme Court Decision in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case.'"
Finally, some soundbites MSNBC can run with! (oh, well maybe FOXNEWS?)
An open letter to Bob Young, re: your open letter to Darl McBride:
Never argue with a fool, you'll be brought down to his level and he'll beat you with experience.
P.S. don't feed the trolls, Bob, really.
It's getting to where any moron can write an "open letter to SCO" and get on Slashdot's frontpage.
...but considering SCO's only product is media spin, some high profile/intelligent people need to counter the bullshit they are pumping out. Else no matter how unintelligent the argument, it will eventually be seen as the truth.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
He has connections with Red Hat so he's not just some "moron." Don't you think you're being overly harsh?
Bob Young is the FOUNDER and CEO of REDHAT...
You know...
The company SUEING SCO.
Here's a clue for you: He's no longer at Red Hat. The original poster's question is valid: why is he here?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Securities fraud is a criminal offence!
Darl, Put a sock in it!
Help fight continental drift.
Because white collar crime results in so many jail sentences, right?
Steal $240 from a convenience store, and you'll get at least 5 years behind bars. Defraud investors of millions, and -- if you're an executive for Worldcom, Enron, or Fannie Mae -- you'll pay a fine and get on with your life.
I guess I caught the meaning of the GPL and its reliance on US Copyright law when I first heard about the GPL, oh, in '87 or '88. The GPL absolutely *DEPENDS* on US Copyright law to exist as-is for it to have meaning, the basis of "I wrote this work and copyright lets me define what terms it can be used by".
What Bob Young is trying to defend is the right under copyright for someone to copyright a work, and define THEIR terms for how that copyrighted work is used and distributed.
What Darl is trying to impress is that there is only ONE way for Copyright to be interpreted and used (which seems only to be "Not the GPL").
Most of us on Slashdot AGREE that there is some basis for SOME justification and need for laws such as patents, trademarks and copyrights, and agree that the processes and systems used for and by these are being abused and warped like no one has seen before, solely because of corporate and IP lawyer greed, not because of any concern for the protections of real individual people.
(Maybe "The Matrix" really is trying to be a subtle wakeup call about how powerful we've allowed corporations to become, and what will happen if it continues, because this time there may not be a Teddy Roosevelt, Sherman Anti-trust Act and a judicial system willing to do the modern equivalent of "trust busting", because corporate america has provided the means for many of the people in the system to get where they are. It's not robots to fear, it is multinational corporations...)
GNU, Stallman, EFF, et al. are NOT arguing for abolition of IP laws, but for not allowing them to be bastardized beyond belief merely by, and for the sole benefits of, Corporate America.
Yes, I would also say that I defend the right of SCO to be able to make their lawsuit, as frivolous and without basis that I think it is. And I pray as much that it does not have the perverse outcomes like the OJ Simpson and latest Microsoft anti-trust cases had.
We all have probably decried about the US Government detaining people outside of the US, on a military installation, without telling them (or us) specifically why they are being detained, without releasing them after 72 hours, etc.
Yet SCO is trying to do the same thing with copyright. "You've cheated us! But we can't tell you exactly how you have, nor will we let you try to fix it beforehand."
It is like some little hot-headed little Napolean and his posse threatening to kick your ass because you did something that pissed him off (woke up? wore white pants after Labor Day? yawned w/o covering your mouth?), he won't tell you what it was that you did, and won't let you apologize for it, etc., because he *really* wants to kick your ass...
Oh, well...
The DMCA is the equivalent of trying to stop break-and-entry of homes by making screwdrivers illegal.
The DMCA wouldn't make screwdrivers illegal. It would just make it illegal for you to publish instructions on how to fabricate a screwdriver, locate the door, and insert the screwdriver.
It seems to me that he equates incentive to create with profit. Now, I'm not an idealist or anything and money is a good incentive but there are some of us who just want to advance the art/science. Can he not see that? Surely he must be aware of it. Perhaps he thinks the world is so materialistic that everyone would simply buy his argument.
Whenever I read his argument I imagine either:
1. Mr. Burns pulling his hair out, unable to comprehend this new "madness" of non-profit work.
2. Sauron, unable to imagine what the little geeks have in mind for Linux's profit potentials...
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Darl has apparently violated several clauses in the GPL. Are any of these actionable? Is there a precident for this? I can't imagine a more fitting ending for this than Darl being slapped with a class action lawsuit by kernel contributers (as he's being slapped with his cellmate's schlong, securities fraud==bad). I know Linus wants to avoid this kind of litigation, but a successful suit defending the IP rights of contributers and OSS copyright holders, I feel, can only be good for the GPL.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Bob sounds battle weary like the rest of us who care and his point anyway is to alert us to the sinister nature of Darls sad view point and that forces are at work who would see Mr McBide's selfish take on copyright enshrined in law. Nothing new here that aside tho' but the message is clear: the proprietory system is under threat and the lobbying must already have started.
Don't be afraid but be very alert!
\SCO should have learned from the mistakes that RAMBUS made... You can't build a business model around litigation. Wheres Rambus now?
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Maybe at first the executives had some strange idea about collecting royalties, but when they threw a stone at the sleeping dragon (IBM), it was clear that they just wanted someone to buy SCO, making them rich. Now that this plan fell through, they're trying pump-and-dump. Wilder and wilder claims follow hard on one another, and with each surge in the share price, SCO's leadership sell off a bunch of shares (as others have pointed out here before). The fact that they are offering their lawyers a big chunk of cash if someone buys SCO indicates that they're still in hopes that this will happen.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Increasingly, businesses love Linux because it reduces their costs. Because software is so readily replicable, it makes sense for it to have a near-zero marginal cost after it is created. The idea of a significant per-copy price just doesn't match well with how software is created. The rewards depend almost solely on the size of the market, irrespective of how much work went into the project. As an example, my organization recently installed an electronic medical record product that is a MS Access application. The price - close to $200K. The app is non-trivial, but it involved an infinitesimally small amount of development compared to Access itself, which is available for a couple hundred dollars. Does this make sense in any rational world? I think a more logical system would be to consider software inherently public, like roads or parks, and fund software development through the government, much as we fund medical research with the NIH. I'm generally a proponent of keeping as much as possible in the free-market, private sector, but the intrinsic characteristics of software seem to fit better with it being a public resource.
Sure but were they forced to keep distributing the music, with the infringing part included, and forbidden from correcting the problem?
The idea is ludicrous.
What they've always really wanted is to get a license fee from each copy of Linux in any commercial use.
No, what they've always really wanted is to portray Linux as an outlaw, anti-American OS, because that is what their paymasters at Microsoft want.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
The truth is that the head executives at SCO really believed that there was some part of SysV inside Linux
I disagree - refusing to show the alleged infringing code shows that they don't have any evidence at all; by refusing to show the alleged infringing code, they are effectively preventing themselves from reaping any monetary benefits from the alleged infringement. A first year law student would know this (do some reading on the Doctrine of Laches).
and you can tell by the malloc() and other examples that they were showing to the analysts under nondisclosure.
I disagree - their examples can also be explained by desire to decieve people who they think wouldn't know better.
What they've always really wanted is to get a license fee from each copy of Linux in any commercial use.
This may be true, but simply put, it's just not gonna happen.
That's why they've resisted explaining exactly which code they consider infringing,
Again, no. If this was true, then Darl and co is living in a dream world - nobody is that stupid. Their lawyers would have pointed out that it was hopeless, and they'd be screwing themselves by not coming up with their 'evidence'.
From a logic standpoint, the only explanation is that SCO knows that there is no infringing code. To believe otherwise is to believe that every lawyer under their employ is so horribly inept that they never would have passed the bar.
If Darl's goal was go try to get some company to get excited about the potential of SCO and buy the company for big bucks (which seems pretty likely, or at least some version thereof), then what this guy thinks of Darl's claims about copyright and IP and his itemized rebuttals are completely missing the point. Quite possibly, Darl would say ANYTHING that he thinks might get someone to make him a great offer on the company, and couldn't care LESS what the legal realities of any of the claims are. The idea seems to be if you spread enough FUD that SOMEONE will think you must have some kind of interesting case that is worth investing in, and gobble the company up for big bux.
The only surprise for Darl is that it hasn't happened yet-- the P.T. Barnum effect doesn't seem to be working very well. Never fear though, perhaps Darl's claims just haven't been quite preposterous enough-- yet.
Darl may very well have learned his tricks from the old back of the magazine ad scams-- like the famous one that read "Last chance, send 25c" and nothing else. Supposedly the guy got all kinds of folks to send him quarters.
There's no point in looking so deep into motivations that are so shallow.