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.'"

Comments

sticking it to Darl

[glassesmonkey]

From Young's open letter to Darl:

The sad thing about your arguments is that you undermine them by running your company so badly.

These self-serving "open letters" make SCO appear extremely untrustworthy.

Darl, for the sake of your case in front of the courts, for the sake of your company's ability to win customers, for the sake of everyone's blood pressure, and to save yourself further personal embarrassment, you might want to be less vocal.

Finally, some soundbites MSNBC can run with! (oh, well maybe FOXNEWS?)

Hey

[iamdrscience]

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.

Not this again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's getting to where any moron can write an "open letter to SCO" and get on Slashdot's frontpage.

I *MOSTLY* Agree...

[thecampbeln]

...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.

Umm, not everyone

[Kris_J]

Secondly, no one is arguing against copyright. Everyone agrees Intellectual Property, from trademark law, to copyrights and patents, is a good thing.

I'm arguing against copyright. Not necessarily in the context of SCO vs The Real World, but I no longer believe that IP benefits the community, on balance.

Re:Umm, not everyone

[dtfinch]

Copyright is an incentive to create. People can share if they want. Without copyright, there would be no more incentive to create public works than there is today, perhaps even less. For example, the GPL relies on copyright to keep derivative works in the public domain.

It's software patents that everyone should be fighting, whereby someone with money to spare can buy from the government the right to collect fees on the original works of others, regardless of if those others came up with the same ideas entirely on their own.

Re:Umm, not everyone

[nagora]

In a country ruled "by the people, for the people" all laws should theoretically be to benefit the community (ie, the people). If a law only aids a small number of people while disadvantaging most then it is exactly the sort of tyranny the founders of America said they were trying to escape.

The aristocracy of the modern day US have managed to turn this on its head to the point where most Americans now believe that laws disadvantaging any of that same aristocracy are "communist" and bad.

George the Third would have been astonded at the power wielded by Bush, Gates, Murdoch, Turner, to say nothing of the much more faceless 1% of America that have the money to buy their own laws, senators or even presidencies.

TWW

Re:Damn buncha cluebies around here...

[zieroh]

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?

Re:Darl McBride will most likely go to jailfor fra

[NSash]

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.

Re:Unclear blurb.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

McBride is a sad man...

[Comatose51]

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...

GPL vs. SCO

[bckrispi]

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.

Re:SCO goals

[JaredOfEuropa]

What they've always really wanted is to get a license fee from each copy of Linux in any commercial use. That's why they've resisted explaining exactly which code they consider infringing, because they were afraid Linus would order it replaced right away (which of course he would, if there was any.)

Isn't that a rather faulty premise, really? It might work if every company with commercial Linux installations were foolish enough to pay the license fee, but I cannot imagine that any court would allow SCO to collect royalties on a product that is mostly other people's work, with a just few (alledged) lines of SCO's code in it. Not without at least disclosing which lines actually belong to SCO, which would then allow the core team to replace those lines.

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.