WARNING: LONG EMAIL
You don't get more mainstream than _The Economist_. It is interesting to me
how in their characteristically fair-minded way they paint Daryl McBride as a
lunatic. It is sad to me how they highlight that he is a "devout Mormon". On
the whole, it's a good summary.
In other news, John C. Dvorak writes in his "Inside Track" column in the
October 1, 2003 _PC Magazine_ that though he thinks the claims by Matthew
Szulik at Linux World about the traditional software industry "is dying" are
overblown, and though he isn't convinced that open source produces software
quicker, he concedes that it appears to produce superior quality software. He
also shares this insight into the legal battles around SCO:
"I have always been convinced that targeting IBM in such litigation is
_always a bad idea_, since IBM has patents on everything, and many of these
patents go a long way back. If IBM doesn't have a patent, then it has prior
art on its side, having dominated all of computerdom in the formative years
of semiconductor-based systems. Simply put, you can't sue IBM unless you are
one guy with one lone patent that may actually be original, and then you
probably don't have enough resources to fight IBM. Unless SCO can portray
itself as some _hapless victim_, it's toast.
"In the meantime, SCO is asking for $32 per embedded device that uses Linux.
_What planet_ are these folks from, anyway? That's an outrageous royalty."
It sounds like the more outrageous SCO gets, the better the press we receive.
Richard Esplin
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
<snip>
LINUX
AUGUST 28TH 2003
Darl McBride, capitalist crusader against the commie horde of Linux
users
SCO, for anyone who has never heard of the company, is pronounced
"skoh", as in Scopes. Indeed "the SCO case" of 2003 sounds increasingly
like the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted religious
fundamentalists against progressives wanting to teach Darwin alongside
the Bible in American classrooms. The SCO case plays the same role in a
culture war now consuming the software industry. On one side are the
equivalents of the fundamentalists--buttoned-down types clinging to
proprietary and closed computer systems. Facing them are today's
evolutionists--the pony-tailed set championing collaboration and
openness in the form of Linux, an operating system that anybody can
download and customise for nothing. The 1925 trial had a monkey as its
symbol; the 2003 case has the Linux trademark, a cute penguin.
Leading the fundamentalists is Darl McBride, who was hired as SCO's
chief executive a year ago. SCO was called Caldera at the time, and was
in a sorry state. It distributed Linux, but was bad at it and made
losses. Caldera had, however, recently bought the rights to UNIX, an
old operating system, from a Californian firm, Santa Cruz Operations,
which in turn had bought them from Novell, which had got them from
AT&T. Mr McBride, like several directors at Caldera, has worked for
Novell and is a devout Mormon. He seemed a natural choice to rescue the
firm.
Immediately, he says, he started thinking about "how to monetise our
assets"--ie, Caldera's rights to UNIX. Roughly as apes and humans
allegedly have common ancestors, several operating systems can trace
their lineage to UNIX, including Linux. Sure enough, says Mr McBride,
he soon found "massive and widespread violations" of Caldera's
intellectual property in the Linux code. At a more general level (and
surprisingly for a Linux distributor), he found the entire
free-software trend "communistic", he says: "We don't get the whole
free-lunch thing."
So Mr McBride prepared for war. He changed Caldera's name to SCO (the
initials of the less obscure Santa Cruz Operations), and hired David
Boies, a lawyer who had gained an international reputation by
representing the American government against Microsoft, and then Al
Gore in the hanging-chads episode in Florida in 2000. Then he opened
fire. In March, he sued IBM, a huge backer of Linux, for damages of $1
billion, later upping this to $3 billion. In June, he opened a new
front by threatening 1,500 companies that use Linux. In July, he said
that licence fees would be $699 per server.
At first, industry gossip was that Mr McBride's strategy was simply to
manoeuvre IBM into ending SCO's misery by buying the firm. There were
precedents. Before Mr McBride's time, Caldera's owners once profitably
sued Microsoft. And in 1998, Mr McBride himself won what he calls a
"seven-figure settlement" by suing his employer at the time, IKON
Office Solutions (who, he says, had breached contract by urging him to
move to an office outside Utah). The Linux battle, however, "is not
about suing but about doing the right thing," Mr McBride insists.
Be that as it may, IBM shows absolutely no inclination to buy SCO.
Instead, in August, IBM sued right back, charging that SCO has violated
the open-source licence that governs Linux (which SCO, after all, has
been distributing) and infringed four of IBM's own UNIX patents.
Meanwhile, SCO has become widely hated. In a cruel irony, the boss of
Novell, Mr McBride's alma mater, wrote a letter ("Dear Darl") arguing
that SCO is confused about what it owns and challenging SCO to end the
"vagueness" of its accusations. SUSE, the biggest European distributor
of Linux, has taken SCO to court in Germany. In August, Red Hat, the
world's biggest Linux distributor, did the same in America.
What most bothers the open-sourcers is SCO's refusal to reveal which
lines of code it considers problematic. "Here are these people who
claim we are pirates but refuse to say where and how," says Bruce
Perens, an open-source evangelist. After all, he says, remedying the
situation would be "trivially easy". The Linux "community"--numberless
hobby hackers--would simply converge on the code and rewrite it within
hours or days.
Mr McBride argues that he cannot reveal the detailed code that SCO lays
claim to because to do so would be, in effect, "open-sourcing"
it--which to his mind would be capitulating to communism. He will show
the code, he adds, to anybody who signs a non-disclosure agreement--but
what use would it be for a Linux hacker to see the code but forever
shut up about it? On August 18th, Mr McBride seemed to give in a bit by
showing a few slides of partially encrypted code in a Las Vegas
conference room. Somebody took a photo and showed it to Mr Perens, who
found that the lines have been published so many times over the years
that a simple Google search will point to them. Legally, the sample
seems a non-issue.
KULTURKAMPF
In terms of impact, however, it is an issue. SCO has caused enough
uncertainty that technology consultancies, such as Gartner and Yankee
Group, are advising clients to wait and see before adopting Linux. This
certainly suits the rest of the fundamentalist camp, above all
Microsoft, whose proprietary Windows operating system is Linux's most
bitter rival. It has not gone unnoticed that Microsoft is one of the
few companies that has actually paid SCO for a Linux licence, even
though Microsoft has no use for one. Microsoft and SCO vehemently deny
that they are in league, but most open-sourcers assume that the evil
Redmond giant is bankrolling a mercenary.
Thus the two sides are digging into their trenches. "We're absolutely
not going away, and they're not giving up, so we got a big problem,"
says Mr McBride. Like the fundamentalists of 1925, he may end up being
a footnote in history; or he may arrest the Linux evolution. As yet, it
is too early to tell.
See this article with graphics and related items at
http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%298%2C%2EPQ%5B%2B%23P%23
%2C%0A
Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from
the Economist Group.
<snip>
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This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2003 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm
<snip>
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