Mr. McBride: Late yesterday I learned that you have charged that your company
is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged
the press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free
Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are
up in arms not because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because
little gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. Bwahahaha! Fire up the
orbital mind-control lasers!
Very few things could possibly illustrate the brain-boggling disconnect
between SCO and reality with more clarity than hearing you complain about how
persecuted your company is. You opened this ball on 6 March by accusing the
open-source community of criminality and incompetence as a way to set up a
lawsuit against IBM. You have since tried to seize control of our volunteer
work for your company's exclusive gain, and your lawyers have announced the
intention to destroy not just the GPL but all the open-source licenses on
which our community is built. It's beyond me how can have the gall to talk as
though we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against you.
IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!
I'm not sure which possibility is more pathetic — that the CEO of SCO is lying
through his teeth for tactical reasons, or that you genuinely aren't capable
of recognizing honest outrage when you see it. To a manipulator, all
behaviors are manipulation. To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy.
Is that you? Have you truly forgotten that people might make common cause out
of integrity, ethical considerations, or simple self-defense? Has the reality
you inhabit truly become so cramped and ugly?
I'm in at least semi-regular communication with most of the people and
organizations who are causing you problems right now. The only conspiracy
among us is the common interest in preventing the open-source community from
being destroyed by SCO's greed and desperation. (And we think it's a perfect
sign of that desperation that at SCOforum you ‘proved’ your relevance by
bragging about the amount of press coverage SCO generates. Last I checked,
companies demonstrated relevance by showing products, not press clippings.)
Yes, one of the parties I talk with is, in fact, IBM. And you know what?
They're smarter than you. One of the many things they understand that you do
not is that in the kind of confrontation SCO and IBM are having, independent
but willing allies are far better value than lackeys and sock puppets.
Allies, you see, have initiative and flexibility. The time it takes a lackey
to check with HQ for orders is time an ally can spend thinking up ways to
make your life complicated that HQ would be too nervous to use. Go on, try to
imagine an IBM lawyer approving this letter.
The very best kind of ally is one who comes to one's side for powerful reasons
of his or her own. For principle. For his or her friends and people. For the
future. IBM has a lot of allies of that kind now. It's an alliance you drove
together with your arrogance, your overreaching, your insults, and your
threats.
And now you cap it all with this paranoid ranting. It's classic, truly
classic. Was this what you wanted out of life, to end up imitating the doomed
villain in a cheesy B movie? Tell me, does that dark helmet fit comfortably?
Are all the minions cringing in proper form? "No, Mr. Torvalds, I expect you
to die!" I'd ask if you'd found the right sort of isolated wasteland for your
citadel of dread yet, but that would be a silly question; you're in Utah,
after all.
It doesn't have to be this way. Sanity can still prevail. Here's the message
that Jeff Gerhardt read at SCOforum again:
In recent months, the company formerly known as Caldera and now trading as SCO
has alleged that the 2.4 Linux kernel contains code misappropriated from it.
We in the open-source community are respectful of intellectual-property
rights, and take pride in our ability to solve our own problems with our own
code. If there is infringing code in the Linux kernel, our community wants no
part of it and will remove it.
We challenge SCO to specify exactly which code it believes to be infringing,
by file and line number, and on what grounds it is infringing. Only with
disclosure can we begin the process of remedying any breach that may exist.
If SCO is truly concerned about protecting its property, rather than simply
using the mere accusations as a pretext to pump its stock price and collect
payoffs from Microsoft for making trouble, then it will welcome the
opportunity to have its concerns resolved as quickly and with as little
disruption as possible. We are willing to cooperate with that.
The open-source community is not, however, willing to sit idly by while SCO
asserts proprietary control, and the right to collect license fees, over the
entirety of Linux. That is an unacceptable attempt to hijack the work
thousands of volunteer programmers contributed in good faith, and must end.
If SCO is willing to take the honest, cooperative path forward, so are we. If
it is not, let the record show that we tried before resorting to more
confrontational means of defending our community against predation.
Linus Torvalds is backing me on this, and our other chieftains and
philosopher-princes will as well. Show us the overlaps. If your code has been
inserted in our work, we'll remove it — not because you've threatened us but
because that's the right thing to do, whether the patches came from IBM or
anywhere else. Then you can call off your lawyers and everyone will get to go
home happy.
Take that offer while you still can, Mr. McBride. So far your so-called
‘evidence’ is [redacted]; you'd better climb down off your high horse before
we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you. How you finish the contract
fight you picked with IBM is your problem. As the president of OSI, defending
the community of open-source hackers against predators and carpetbaggers is
mine — and if you don't stop trying to destroy Linux and everything else
we've worked for I guarantee you won't like what our alliance is cooking up
next.
And in case it's not pellucidly clear by now, not one single solitary
[redacted] thing I have said or published since 6 March (or at any time
previously for that matter) has been at IBM's behest. I'm very much afraid
it's all been me, acting to serve my people the best way I know how. IBM
doesn't have what it would take to buy me away from that job and neither do
you. I'm not saying I don't have a price — but it ain't counted in money, so
I won't even bother being insulted by your suggestion.
You have a choice. Peel off that dark helmet and deal with us like a
reasonable human being, or continue down a path that could be bad trouble for
us but will be utter ruin — quite possibly including jail time on fraud,
intellectual-property theft, barratry, and stock-manipulation charges — for
you and the rest of SCO's top management. You have my email, you can have my
phone if you want it, and you have my word of honor that you'll get a fair
hearing for any truths you have to offer.
Eric S. Raymond
esr@thyrsus.com
President, Open Source Initiative
Friday, 20 August 2003
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