SCO Offers More Threats
An
interesting sideshow in Las Vegas last week was Darl McBride’s
keynote at cdXPO, a first time IT show running in the same time
slot as COMDEX, at the Mandalay Bay complex.
SCO’s CEO arrived with the expected fanfare, complete
with earwire-equipped bodyguards.
(I’ve
never seen a violent open source developer, but perhaps this is a
deeply held belief; when Microsoft was planning to attend its
first Linux show they called to ask whether I thought they would
be in danger on the show floor. I suggested the only danger they were in was dying of
loneliness – or perhaps being hit by a banana cream pie.
Since they now regularly put booths on Linux show floors, I
assume they’ve discovered the natives are friendly.
Perhaps we could ask them to give open source a reference
to SCO?)
I’ve
waited to write this column (I had originally intended to go write
a blog about it right after the event) because I was so enraged by
watching McBride’s antics that I knew I needed some time to
recover my journalistic objectivity.
Let us say that this guy does some things I really hate.
He
makes his point of view and his goals really clear.
“I was looking for new revenue,” he said, describing
his actions shortly after he arrived at SCO.
“The Linux community wasn’t one of my constituents.”
So the fact that SCO had been in the Linux business (still
was, at that point), belonged to a Linux consortium (United
Linux), and had derived benefits from belonging to the open source
community seemed to him to be beside the point.
Moreover,
McBride takes a little grain of fact or truth and then wraps it
with spin, embroidery, and distraction until what he’s just said
either has nothing to do with anything – or is the exact
opposite of the facts at hand.
Some
cases in point:
-
His
constant references to the “record” (his one-sided record)
of his company and the industry, leaving out anything that
would inconveniently contradict his point of view.
-
His
shifting claims, with no acknowledgement of the shifts.
Remember, this started out as only a contractual suit
against IBM with no copyright infringements involved.
Suddenly, we’re demanding licenses from hundreds of
Linux users and talking about suing some large user to make it
clear SCO is to be taken seriously.
(We, of course, know that they haven’t been taken
seriously; a recent survey of 100 large companies who use
Linux noted that 85 had no concern at all about the SCO law
suit. Gartner,
who had originally advised its clients to consider not
implementing more projects on Linux, now advises that buying
licenses may not be necessary or advisable.)
Like
any bully, Darl McBride threatens with a big stick.
In this case, he waived the vision of David Boies as a
legal opponent. My
opinion of David Boies has shifted quite a bit as a result of the
SCO lawsuit and not for the better.
I think of him as a kind of mercenary, sharing in the
possible spoils of war. And
I remember that in the two “famous” cases that McBride keeps
pointing to – the Microsoft antitrust case and the Gore/Bush
election case – Boise’s track record isn’t great.
In the former, he won the battle, but may, in the light of
history, have lost the war. In
the latter, he just lost.
-
Showing
a picture of Richard Stallman, the creator of GNU and the GPL,
and leaving the picture up while he ranted about the fact that
while he “really liked Richard,” he needed to remind us
that Richard believes all software should be free and then
implying, no stating, that this meant open source software.
This ignores several important facts.
-
Lots
of software distributed under the GPL is also distributed
under matching non-GPL licenses (MySQL is a good example),
where users can choose how they will acquire and use the
software and whether they will pay a license fee for its use,
or agree (under the GPL license) to add their code to the
available open source code.
-
Also,
while Linux is open source code distributed under the GPL,
much of the infrastructure and applications software delivered
by ISVs to run ON Linux is neither open source nor GPL.
Running on an open source operating system does not
affect your intellectual property rights to your software.
Along
the way, Darl McBride said several things that he may believe, but
which I find truly offensive:
-
“Money
is the only incentive.”
He was implying the problem with the open source model
is that developers won’t write great code for the love of
it. Obviously he
doesn’t understand things like the passion to perform
something with great skill and elegance and to offer it to
your peers as proof of your craft.
Every reputation model is built around that idea.
Money has nothing to do with it at all.
-
That
open source developers don’t believe in intellectual
property or copyrights. I
understand why he says that – in some sense, it’s part of
the theory of his case. I
am offended that he thinks anyone would believe it since the
GPL is a copyright – it’s just a different one than the
kind he prefers. Every
developer who places IP under the GPL is doing so because he
wants his IP protected and protected in a specific way.
That’s the whole point.
It’s
like this newsletter, Darl. I
freely give, in the tradition of the Internet, the right to link
to anything I post. But
the newsletter is published under my copyright.
Copy it to your website or print it without my permission
and I’ll notify you and, failing corrective action, sue you.
Darl
McBride summed up his case by saying that he believes:
-
Today’s
GPL will not survive, although open source will.
(He’s depending on that; he needs it.)
-
Linux
will not be free (because he intends to tax it).
-
UNIX
on Intel will continue to drive mission critical applications
for the Fortune1000 as well as small business, running on SCO
and Solaris x86. (I
guess this means we just disagree, Darl, and so does every
market forecaster I know.)
-
SCO
will prevail. (We’ll have to wait for the courts for the outcome, but if
you’d like to place a bet, I think we’ll start a pool.)
In
fact, McBride really says it all when he tells the audience how he
raised the value of his company from $6 million to $200 million by
suing first IBM and then the Linux user community.
He thinks this is a great idea.
It
seems to us that the future of his company can’t be about
selling great software because who will want to do business with
SCO after all this? Perhaps
the rise in the market cap is really about taking bets on the
outcome of the court case. In
that case, it may be just one more financial scheme. If that’s the case, of course, losing in court would mean
an end to SCO – and a good reason why Gartner is now advising
customers for SCO UNIX that they should have an alternative plan
on the back burner.
Meantime,
here are some references you might like to read:
Eben
Moglen’s position paper, released by the Open Source Development
Labs, on SCO’s attack on the GPL and why he believes the GPL
will stand at http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2003/2003_11_24_beaverton.html
A
Letter to SCO at the Groklaw site (the whole site is about the SCO
case) at http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20030923112622826
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