Groklaw: Groklaw’s Open Letter to SCO’s CEO Darl McBride

“Recently you wrote an ‘open letter to the open source
community’ published September 9, 2003 by LinuxWorld. This reply is
from a group within the open source/free software community.
Because you addressed your letter to our community-at-large, we
thought we should answer you ourselves.

“Our community isn’t organized hierarchically like a
corporation, so it has no CEO or overall leader in that sense,
except that Linus Torvalds leads Linux kernel development and
Richard Stallman leads the GNU Project and the Free Software
Foundation (FSF). We have written this letter together on the
website, Groklaw, which is a research and news site currently
dedicated to covering developments in the news about your
company.

“Quite a number in the group are software engineers, including
contributors to the Linux kernel. Others are proprietors of
Linux-based businesses or executives or employees of Linux-related
businesses. A few of us are lawyers, one is a paralegal, one a
stockbroker, at least one is a physicist, a couple are journalists,
one is a retired policeman, another a retired truck driver, others
are in or have been in the military, and some work or have worked
in government. We also have experienced UNIX programmers among us
who personally witnessed the history of UNIX since its inception,
participated in its development, and know the software well. One of
us is a non-technical grandmother who installed GNU/Linux herself
recently and fell in love with the software. We are a large,
international and varied group of people, which is appropriate
because GNU/Linux is developed and used worldwide and the open
source community to which you directed your letter is both global
and diverse…”

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