“I now live in the smaller city of Cambridge, Mass. Murder and
robbery occur there, too; I do not know if Cambridge police
regularly lie in court, but proprietary software is rife.
Nonetheless, I have never seen anyone try to condemn the whole city
of Cambridge for this. Here, too, people recognize that guilt by
association is an injustice.“However, people don’t always remember to apply the principle.
My virtual community, the free software community which I have
helped to build since 20 years ago by developing the GNU operating
system, is now the victim of a campaign of guilt by association. A
number of articles–I have seen some–have tried to hold our entire
community guilty for the development of the MyDoom virus.“We can be pretty sure that some New Yorkers have committed
murder, because they have been tried and convicted for it. We do
not know whether anyone in the free software community participated
in the development of MyDoom. The developers have not been
identified; they know who they are, but you and I else can only
speculate. We could speculate that users of GNU/Linux developed the
virus to attack SCO. We could speculate that Microsoft developed
the virus so it would be blamed on us. We could speculate that
disgruntled former SCO employees developed the virus to get even.
But there is no evidence for any of these speculations…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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