Mr. McBride, in your "Open Letter to the Open Source Community" your offer to
negotiate with us comes at the end of a farrago of falsehoods, half-truths,
evasions, slanders, and misrepresentations. You must do better than this. We
will not attempt to erect a compromise with you on a foundation of
dishonesty.
Your statement that Eric Raymond was "contacted by the perpetrator" of the
DDoS attack on SCO begins the falsehoods. Mr. Raymond made very clear when
volunteering his information and calling for the attack to cease that he was
contacted by a third-party associate of the perpetrator and does not have the
perpetrator's identity to reveal. The DDoS attack ceased, and has not
resumed. Mr. Raymond subsequently received emailed thanks for his action from
Blake Stowell of SCO.
Your implication that the attacks are a continuing threat, and that the
President of the Open Source Initiative is continuing to shield their
perpetrator, is therefore not merely both false and slanderous, but
contradictory with SCO's own previous behavior. In all three respects it is
what we in the open-source community have come to expect from SCO. If you are
serious about negotiating with anyone, rather than simply posturing for the
media, such behavior must cease.
In fact, leaders of the open-source community have acted responsibly and
swiftly to end the DDoS attacks - just as we continue to act swiftly to
address IP-contamination issues when they are aired in a clear and
responsible manner. This history is open to public inspection in the
linux-kernel archives and elsewhere, with numerous instances on record of
Linus Torvalds and others refusing code in circumstances where there is
reason to believe it might be compromised by third-party IP claims.
As software developers, intellectual property is our stock in trade. Whether
we elect to trade our effort for money or rewards of a subtler and more
enduring nature, we are instinctively respectful of concerns about IP,
credit, and provenance. Our licenses (the GPL and others) work with copyright
law, not against it. We reject your attempt to portray our community as a
howling wilderness of IP thieves as a baseless and destructive smear.
We in the open-source community are accountable. Our source code is public,
exposed to scrutiny by anyone who wishes to contest its ownership. Can SCO or
any other closed-source vendor say the same? Who knows what IP violations,
what stripped copyrights, what stolen techniques lurk in the depths of
closed-source code? Indeed, not only SCO's past representations that it was
merging GPLed Linux technology into SCO Unix but Judge Debevoise's rulings in
the last big lawsuit on Unix IP rights suggest strongly that SCO should clean
up its own act before daring to accuse others of theft.
SCO taxes IBM and others with failing to provide warranties or indemnify users
against third-party IP claims, conveniently neglecting to mention that the
warranties and indemnities offered by SCO and others such as Microsoft are
carefully worded so that the vendor's liability is limited to the software
purchase price, They thus offer no actual shield against liability claims or
damages. They are, in a word, shams designed to lull users into a false sense
of security -- a form of sham which we believe you press on us solely as
posturing, rather than out of any genuine concern for users. We in the
open-source community, and our corporate allies, refuse to play that
dishonest game.
You invite us to negotiate, but you have persistently refused to state a
negotiable claim. You have made allegations of a million lines of copied code
which are mathematically impossible given the known, publicly accessible
history of Linux development. You have uttered vast conspiracy theories which
fail to be vague only where they are slanderous and insulting. You have
already been compelled to abandon major claims - such as the ownership of SMP
technology alleged in your original complaint against IBM - on showings that
they were false, and that you knew or should have known them to be false,
Accordingly, we of the open-source community do not concede that there is
anything to negotiate. Linux is our work and our lawful property, the
distillation of twelve years of hard work, idealism, creativity, tears, joy,
and sweat by hundreds of thousands of cooperating hackers all over the world.
It is not yours, has never been yours, and will never be yours.
If you wish to make a respectable case for contamination, show us the code.
Disclose the overlaps. Specify file by file and line by line which code you
believe to be infringing, and on what grounds. We will swiftly meet our
responsibilities under law, either removing the allegedly infringing code or
establishing that it entered Linux by routes which foreclose proprietary
claims.
Yours truly,
Eric Raymond
Bruce Perens
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