[H-GEN] RFC: SCO

[Greg Black]

On 2003-06-17, Andrae Muys wrote:

[Lots of good stuff that I agree with elided.]

> One area that has yet to show visibly is the growing resentment at SCO's 
> attempts to portray the community as disrespectful of intellectual 
> property rights.  It might be worth pointing out that in the past 2 
> decades software copyright infringment (you may need to use the word 
> piracy here :( has become common-place throughout our society.  In a 
> time when people faced with the choice of infringing on copyright and 
> "writing your own" have almost universally chosen to infringe copyright, 
> the Open Source Community has chosen the latter.  Far from being the IP 
> law rebels casually disregarding the law for their own ideology, the 
> Open Source Community has repeatably demonstrated the highest respect 
> for IP law and copyright!

Although this sounds nice, it's not true as a generalisation.
I, for one, have no respect at all for IP law, copyright or
nonsense like software patents.  (I do comply with laws that
attempt to enshrine these things, for the same reasons that I
comply with traffic laws -- but I have no respect for either the
laws or the so-called rights of the patent holders and other
greedy clowns of that ilk.)  I've spoken to a lot of software
developers over the years that I've been writing software and I
know that my attitude is quite common.

> Of course the fact that IBM is one of the IT worlds largest companies, 
> and the largest patent holder in the world, who has invested over 
> $1billion in linux in the past couple of years, gives us some confidence 
> in the outcome.

Yes, it makes us think that IBM will probably win a court case.
But, as I said in another message, this does not make IBM the
good guys.  I have prior connections with IBM to declare[1], so
some of what follows may need to be taken with the proverbial
pinch of salt.

First, it's important to recognise that IBM are not on our side,
or the side of open source software, of the side of Linux.  IBM
are on IBM's side; nothing else matters at all to them.

Consider the following excerpts from IBM's latest statement on
this issue:

    Since filing its lawsuit against I.B.M., SCO has made public
    statements and accusations about I.B.M.'s Unix license and
    about Linux in an apparent attempt to create fear,
    uncertainty and doubt among I.B.M.'s customers and the
    open-source community.

Does anybody else find it funny that IBM, the people who
invented FUD, are now claiming the same thing against a
competitor?

    I.B.M. will continue to ship, support and develop AIX which
    represents years of I.B.M. innovation, hundreds of millions
    of dollars of investment and many patents.

IBM is one of the biggest offenders in the whole ugly and sorry
business of software patents, and has some of the most blatantly
illegitimate such patents.  IBM uses those patents to bludgeon
its competitors.

    As always, I.B.M. will stand behind our products and our
    customers.

As I said, neither Linux nor the open source movement feature in
IBM's concerns.

I'm sure that IBM will thump SCO, and I'll be glad to see SCO
disappear off the face of the earth -- they deserve nothing else
after this utter stupidity.  But I won't be cheering for IBM and
I'll still be concerned about IBM's plans.

Greg

[1] My past history with IBM goes back to the 1960's, when they
    decided not to employ me as a programmer because they had
    detected a lack of suitable corporate discipline in me.  In
    retrospect, I'm glad I missed out on that job; and IBM were
    right about me.  But I was resentful that they chose to
    reject somebody who had obtained the highest ever score on
    their aptitude test on the basis of a personality defect.

    Fifteen years later, I worked as a consultant for an IBM
    team who were getting IBM's early Unix efforts under way.  I
    spent many hours on international phone calls trying to
    explain to their software drones that their constant efforts
    to "fix" what they thought were bugs in various parts of the
    Unix system and applications were not only misguided but had
    a serious negative impact on the usefulness of the entire
    system. 

    Some years later, I again worked as a consultant to an IBM
    team that was putting together 20,000 PC's and half a dozen
    mainframes for a project whose software component took a
    team of 600 programmers to write.  The IBM way clashed with
    my way many times during that project.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
GPG signed mail preferred; further information in headers.
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