The SCO Trial Through A New Lens

An anonymous reader writes "On Yahoo! News they've got an article by Paul Murphy entitled, SCO, IBM and Outcomes-Based Circular Reasoning. Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'. He writes, 'By itself this was a straightforward contractual dispute that could, and should, have been settled quickly and easily.' And that, 'Although SCO hasn't formulated its complaint in this way, I believe it could meet these, or similar, requirements quite easily and therefore has every reason to be confident that the court will eventually enforce its stop-use order against IBM.' He also goes on to insult Linux advocates by stating that, 'the position being run up the flagpole by what Stalin famously called "useful idiots" is first that the lawsuit itself is no longer a real issue and secondly that its consequences have been generally positive.'"

Comments

The Thousand Faces of Darl McBride

[MooseByte]

"Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'."

Man, Darl's got more personalities than a Sweeps Week episode of "The Love Boat".

He's missing the point

[Otter]

In fact, the SCO suit has been a windfall for much of the Linux community. Slashdot and the other media have gotten story after story out of it, zealots have had the chance to fantasize themselves into a real world Star Wars where they're participating in an epic struggle between good and evil, Groklaw has gone from being an obscure site with a stupid name to a major Linux player with a stupid name and PJ and Bruce Perens may even have made a few bucks selling Linux insurance.

Admittedly, the word "idiots" may not be totally inapplicable in some of those cases (and "useful" is also debatable) but the benefits were certainly there.

Re:Congress should protect Open Source

[coolGuyZak]

$ echo "dream" | su congress -c 'chmod 444 open\ source'

done. what next?

Re:Could SCO have a chance after all?

[Locke2005]

I wonder what the consequences would be if SCO actually won the case?
Well, for one thing, I'll be really, really happy that I've cornered the heating oil market in Hades!

Re:Could SCO have a chance after all?

[s4m7]

So, in some ways, you could say "Linux is a UNIX clone". In the same ways, you could say "Margarine is a Butter clone".

So maybe we should be saying "I can't believe it's not UNIX!"

Re:Bad argument

[MightyMartian]

It's a little late for this kind of support for SCO. Calling Linux advocates "useful idiots" is kind of neat though. It makes this guy and all the other SCO supporters look like "useless idiots".

What it needs now is:

Kirk: "Save... it... Bones... Save SCO!"

McCoy: "Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a corporate shill."

Spock: "It seems highly illogical to continuing supporting this case."

Kirk: "There must... be... something we can... do... Scotty?"

Scotty: "Aye Cap'n, we'll set the phasers t' maximum FUD."

Sulu: "Haven't we tried that already..."

Kirk: "Shut up Sulu... or... you'll be wearing a red suit! Uhura, patch in a subspace channel to Microsoft. We'll need to replace our dilithium crystals with something stronger... a good dose of under the table cash."

Chekhov: "In Soviet Russia, Microsoft cashes you!"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Could SCO have a chance after all?

[s4m7]

will they make a spray and hire a model whos nose attracts birds?

Spray-on Unix substitute? You, dear fellow, are genius embodied.