[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“I have to admit that I was never much of a believer in open
source. Maybe my business school coursework rendered me blind to
the glorious vision of a ‘gift culture’ in which people contribute
their work to a decentralized development project like Linux for
honor instead of money. Or possibly I’m just too thick to
understand how cutting off a multi-billion dollar revenue stream
from software sales, without putting anything else in its place,
could be good for the software business. Whatever the problem, I
never quite believed in the fairy tale world they promised in which
we’d all get an operating system that was better than Windows in
every way, for absolutely no money–not even when IBM started
retailing Linux PC’s and the juggernaut of fabulous free operating
systems seemed unstoppable. But I confess that in all my skeptical
musings, I did not imagine that Linux might be brought down by
something even more prosaic than a lack of funds: a lawsuit.“Yet that’s looking ever more likely. SCO, which makes a
proprietary version of Unix that Linux competes with, has filed a
suit against the manufacturers of Linux boxes for copyright
infringement. IBM, which has been promoting Linux relentlessly, is
now announcing a countersuit, but it centers mostly on side issues,
rather than the key question: did one of Linux’s thousands of
volunteer developers illegally stick code stolen from SCO into
Linux? Though those who have seen the code in contention say that
SCO probably has a case, it doesn’t seem to be much of a case: the
stolen bits seem to be fairly trivial and easily replaced. But of
course, the object of this lawsuit is not to stop Linux from using
the code; it’s to stop Linux from eating SCO Unix’s lunch. And it
seems to me that it’s very likely to succeed…”