By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
When Darl McBride sent his open letter to the open source
community, I was especially struck by the offer to work with the
community to work out various IP issues and perhaps a new “design a
new business model that enhances the stability and trustworthiness
of the Open Source community in the eyes of enterprise
customers.”
Many members of the community, from everyday desktop users right
on up to Linus Torvalds, jumped on the statements made by McBride
earlier this week, and the arguments offered against the Utah
company have ranged from logically reasoned to outright incensed.
It was, after all, a pretty fair bet that the community would be
upset by the comments made in that letter.
So, I was later surprised by his comments in a Computerworld
interview Thursday that he meant for the Monday letter to be a sort
of “olive branch” to members of the open source community. My first
reaction was that McBride will never have a career as an ambassador
if that was his best effort at conciliation.
My second reaction was to go back and re-read the letter again,
and see if there was something in the letter that I missed. Was
there some statement in McBride’s letter that was truly a opening
for negotiation? Then it occurred to me: this letter may not be
about a true opening of civil communication between The SCO Group
and the open source community at all.
Here’s my reasoning. Torvalds’ reaction to McBride’s letter was
to basically say “negotiate what?”
My eventual reaction was “negotiate with whom?”
If I were a company who wanted to speak to the open source
community, I would send press releases to Linux Today, Linux Weekly
News, and maybe that little site called Slashdot, and I would get
my message across. But if I wanted to interact with the community
in any meaningful way, how would I go about it?
One possible way would be to interact with one or two prominent
members of the community, such as Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Jon
“maddog” Hall, or Torvalds itself. Not as leaders of Linux and Open
Source, per se, but more like ambassadors.
Eric is certainly not hesitant to place himself in such a role,
but his participation in that capacity is often called into
question by some members of the community. I am sure that there
would be some people that would have their own issues with Bruce,
maddog, or Linus.
No matter whom was recommended in this role, there would always
be some group in the community that would say “this person does not
speak for me.”
And I think that this is something that McBride and the rest of
SCO is more than a little aware of. You can make all the motions to
negotiate with the community all you want. But right now, in its
present state, the community is nowhere near organized enough to
sit at the other side of any negotiation table, especially in legal
matters.
I think that SCO is very aware of this, and any move towards
peace with the community is going to be empty because of this.
After essentially calling the community nothing but a bunch of
thieves, trying to license and charge customers for Linux, and
going out of their way to hint that Linux is nothing more than a
pirated version of UNIX, gee, it’s hard to imagine why the Linux
community is upset with SCO.
If SCO really wants peace, then here is what it needs to do. It
should abide by its own suggestions to the community in McBride’s
letter: “Linux end users must take a hard look at the intellectual
property underpinnings of Open Source products and at the GPL (GNU
General Public License) licensing model itself.”
I don’t think there is a single person in the Linux community
that would argue that the developers of the Linux kernel and
open-source software do not care about IP. Over and over, the
community has pledged to remove any infringing code. But SCO has
blocked efforts to do so, citing a need to protect its trade
secrets and requiring any developer that would look at SCO’s UNIX
code to sign that restrictive NDA.
So, after extolling the community directly to take care of IP,
SCO denies us the chance to do that very thing.
SCO wants it both ways. They want to fight a long battle, but
they are seemingly weary of the daily skirmishes. They want their
IP respected, but they are unwilling to even acknowledge that we
want our own version of IP respected. We want Linux clean of any
“stolen” code, if it is there.
But, despite what what they might tell us, The SCO Group does
not just want their IP respected and valued. They also want legal
acknowledgment that they “own” a piece of Linux, so they can gain
monetary revenue from Linux’ burgeoning success. Any other
explanation, I feel, is just a diversionary tactic.
Like McBride’s recent letter.
Because I don’t think this letter was meant for the open source
community at all. After re-reading the missive from Monday, I have
arrived at another conclusion. The messages in this open letter
were not meant for the community: they were meant for the potential
licensees for SCO’s new Linux license.
Knowing that the community is incensed about The SCO Group’s
actions, and knowing that a centralized negotiation with the Linux
community is all but impossible at this time, this letter actually
serves as a laundry list of all that is supposedly wrong with the
community itself.
Look, the letter says, these people will launch DDoS attacks on
you if you disagree with them. Look! They will obstruct justice and
hide the criminals responsible for these attacks. And so on.
The numbered points later in the letter on how the community
allegedly falls short on copyright and IP issues is not a
constructive criticism. It’s a warning to current and potential
Linux customers that tries to scare them with talk of the potential
liabilities those customers will take on with Linux.
Unless those customers take the easy, oh, so simple step of
buying one of SCO’s new Linux licenses.
What brought me to this conclusion was this sentence in
McBride’s letter: “Further, the SCO Group is open to ideas of
working with the Open Source community to monetize software
technology and its underlying intellectual property for all
contributors, not just SCO.”
This may have been over the top; the entreaty that may have
revealed SCO’s actual audience for this letter. At the time, I
wondered who in their right mind in the open source community would
take SCO up on this offer? Then it hit me: no one in the open
source community… but what about outside the community?
In this one sentence, McBride has just asked other companies
that think they have a claim to code within the Linux kernel to
join them in their ongoing “battle for IP.” This statement was
never seriously addressed to the community, because such a
statement to the community is ludicrous.
Looking at the rest of the open letter in this light, it really
began to look more like a message to potential SCO customers.
What clinched it was the interview posted today from
Computerworld. Now, because of the perfectly predicable
kicked-hornets’-nest response from the Linux community, McBride has
the opportunity to say “y’know, we tried to offer an olive branch,
we tried to talk to them, but this Linux community, they just won’t
listen to us.”
Spin translation: “hey, Linux customers, this community won’t
listen to us, and they sure as heck won’t listen to you. You need
the SCO Group to help you use Linux properly.”
The SCO Group may have miscalculated the response from the IT
community when it launched its trade-secret lawsuit against IBM. I
think they assumed they would be perceived as the poor, hapless
victim of Big Blue. But when very few media outlets and analysts
made that assumption, SCO found itself perceived not as the victim,
but as the bully. Especially when IBM did the proper legal tactic
of keeping their mouths shut.
So now SCO has to put itself in the victim position. And they
are provoking the open source community to do the bullying. This is
little different from the little kid on the playground slapping the
big kid and then screaming loudly for help when the big kid towers
over the little one, ready to pummel.
But SCO does not want to kill Linux, just convince customers
that they would be better off working with SCO than with these
rebel open sourcers.
Will it work? The results thus far seem to be mixed. SCO’s stock
price is climbing ever higher, but Linux adoptions continue apace,
unhindered by any threat of a lawsuit or insinuations of negligent
behavior.
Obviously, the solution for the open source community in this
case is to not allow themselves to be baited. SCO can’t claim to be
defending itself if there are nothing being said or done to it.
That’s a really hard pill to swallow for people, myself included.
Personal reputations, pride, and billions of dollars of potential
revenue are at stake, so it’s easy to see why people can get
jumpy.
I am one voice in the community, no more or less important than
anyone else’s. But I urge the community to not overreact to the
statements coming out of Linden, Utah. Analyze, dissect, and
repudiate, sure; but calling for physical harm or advocating
illegal activities is not the proper response in any dispute.
Because, in all honesty, I don’t think SCO really has anything
important to say to the community. They just want to provoke.