By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
Y’know, I had my column all set in my head this week. It was
going to be a thing of metaphorical beauty, as I related to you how
I had a traditional Danish holiday meal instead of the US
Thanksgiving turkey-fest.
Readers would have watched in stunned amazement as I related the
difficulties in getting a pork roast with the skin on is in the US,
and how my hosts had to buy such a roast online to have their
traditional holiday meal (even though they were doing it at
Thanksgiving to accomodate my family… normally, I was told this
is a Christmas dish).
I would have bedazzled you with my metaphorical prowess, as I
related how I felt this roast crisis directly related to the
problems with proprietary software, summing it all up with a
dessert of open-source advocacy that would have had your mouths
watering.
Then SCO had to come and open their big mouth, ruining any
appetite I had for metaphorical wanderings.
(This may have been the first positive thing SCO has done for
Linux Today readers, ever.)
When I first read Darl McBride’s latest letter, I was personally
stunned by the rant-like nature of his missive. Let’s face it, at
the end of the day, I’m going to look at things with an editor’s
eye. And my editor’s eye caught the look of a document that was
trying too hard to say what it wanted to say.
I’ll be honest with you: when I first got the open letter from
the SCO Group yesterday, I debated running it in its entirety on
Linux Today. I reconsidered when I decided I did not want LT to be
a platform for a rant. I don’t have to agree with the opinions
expressed here, but if they are rants or flames, then I am very
likely to link them out.
Here’s a little professional tip: if you use the same phrases
over and over, that’s a big sign of a rant. I caught the quote
McBride used from the US Constitution about useful arts about four
times in that document. Not a lot, but when strung together in
sequential paragraphs, it tends to make you blink and step back a
bit.
Over and over, I kept seeing a bombastic run of citations and
legal quotes. IANAL, as the popular jargon goes, but in my mind I
kept thinking how ridiculous this open letter was because Darl’s
Not a Lawyer, either. Clearly, though, this document is aimed at
Others Who are Also Not Lawyers, in the hopes that they will be
cowed into thinking twice about associating with us commie open
sourcers.
(And wasn’t that just the height of American arrogance to shove
the Constitution in the faces of citizens and subjects of other
nations? Even if McBride’s assertions on the GPL were right (see
Cold Day in Heck for that statistical probablilty) does
that automatically prevent another nation from saying the GPL
is valid? But, I digress…)
Before I was an editor, I was a student of physics, and as such,
I tend to apply linear thinking to life’s little situations.
Because of this I lean heavily on Occam’s Razor: “one should not
increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required
to explain anything.” In other words, the simplest answer is
usually the right one.
Why go after the GPL? Because there are only two possible
outcomes of the SCO v. IBM case: SCO’s code is in the Linux kernel
or it isn’t.
If SCO’s code is proved to be in the Linux kernel, then in five
seconds or less IBM will turn around and say, “but you knowingly
distributed it under the GPL, so you released the code yourselves.”
So clearly it is in SCO’s best interests to try and invalidate the
GPL.
If SCO’s code is not proved to be in the Linux kernel, then
these attacks against the GPL will have still have served their
shorter-term purpose: the increase of revenue from customers SCO
hopes will come knocking on their door instead of using Linux.
Because (and I am sticking to this metaphor) this whole
anti-GPL thing? That’s the distraction, the big magic trick
flourish, that SCO counts on everyone to see while this whole thing
drags on.
While we hopefully forget that SCO has to eventually show the
code and where it came from.
But now, thanks to IBM getting its motions to compel granted,
the magic show may be over within 30 days and the truth revealed.
No NDAs, no anti-GPL diatribes.
Definitely a holiday season I’ll remember.