Darl Goes to Harvard

colinmc151 writes "Both Groklaw and Internet News are reporting on the visit made to Harvard University by Darl McBride, SCO president and CEO, and Chris Sontag SCO senior vice president. Darl and Chris made a presentation titled 'Defending Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Age'. One protester gave out copies of Linux to all that attended. Bottom line SCO plans to carry on with the lawsuits. Best line was one student who when Darl asked if he was impacted by MyDoom.A e-mail virus answered 'No, I use Linux'." One MIT student has a write-up of the event as well...

Comments

Re:Oh Darl, when will you ever learn?

[Otter]

I'd agree more strongly with your point if they'd mentioned what he actually said instead of describing how silly they think he is.

Re:Oh Darl, when will you ever learn?

[JohnLi]

I don't understand why they paraphrased McBride's comments? Why give a full quote of the question and then joke about the answer? Seems to make a serious discusion in an intimate setting look a bit high school.
Sorry.

SCO got compensation

[nuggz]

SCO got compensation for the work they submitted to the Linux kernel.
Their compensation was a licence to use and distribute all the other code.

Civil disobedience

[nuggz]

Civil disobedience is knowingly breaking a law because it is unjust.

It is not performing a legal act despite very vague accusations that it may violate some law or contract.

Re:What kind of students were they?

[lambadomy]

I don't know, I think that this is mixed in with the on-going backlash against corporate litigation, ridiculous patents, and CEO compensation. People feel that SCO has no case, and that while the courts may be the place to sort it out, if SCO loses and the lawsuit is shown to be ridiculous absolutely nothing will happen to the architects of the lawsuit. Darl will make a lot of money, all for playing with the law. This is a nation steeped in the mantra of accountability, regardless of recent flirtations with "political correctness", but in cases like these it is hard to see. There is a real fear that even if/when Darl and SCO lose, they will have won, and that any company can take a similar nothing-to-lose roll of the dice with other peoples money.

Re:What kind of students were they?

[jefe7777]

from reading this page:

http://web.mit.edu/jonas/www/faim/

here's a choice quote that is very important to me:

"This isn't a group of crazy commie hippies who want to destroy their business model(SCO's), but rather, we're engineers and scientists (and law students) who recognize that they may have a valid claim, but tune them out when they(SCO) make irrational statements."

and SCO sure does make a LOT of those irrational comments eh?

SCO _is_ irrational. And if we can keep discrediting them with calm cool logic, and not froth at the mouth, we'll make headway.

Awesome job guys! You guys are role models on how to handle FUD.

RMS is not crazy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Above all, we wanted to go and present the non-RMS, non-crazy-anti-IP side of linux.

[..]

We're having the law forced on us, and if we're not careful, one day we're going to wake up in a world where IP restrictions will take all the fun out of engineering.

Maybe you should go back and listen to "crazy" RMS when he talks about these legal issues. Which he's talked about since day one. And people laughed at him.

When the FSF insists on paperwork for all major contributions, there's a good reason. When they insist that all copyrights be centralized with the FSF, there's a good reason.

Linus may be popular to us geeks because of his easygoing nature, but easygoing gets you eaten alive out in the real world.

Re:The part I do not understand...

[tkrotchko]

"Darl is claiming someone took SCO IP, stuck it in Linux code, and distributed it as GPL"

Yes, and according to Groklaw, that person or persons are Caldera, which is what SCO used to be called.

Distancing ourselves from extremists.

[borgheron]

All,

It's difficult to believe that these attacks (DDoS) and threats on SCO might be from GNU/Linux users.

Despite the timing of the attacks, all of the evidence is highly circumstantial.

We, as a community, however, must distance ourselves from extremists or extremist activities such as this by whatever means possible.

We cannot compromise our core values which are embodied by the work done on Open Source and Free Software, but we also cannot allow corporations to usurp our hard work.

We must, *above all else*, allow this to play out in court as this is the *only* way to make certain something like this doesn't happen again.

This is my message and, while I can't speak for the community, I believe these statments to be undeniable. I, personally, don't think a Linux user is behind the attacks, but if it is, then it's one person or a small group of people who are acting foolishly and should not reflect on the community as a whole.

Thanks, GJC