SCO invites open source people to 'monetize' Linux

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 9 Sep 2003 at 17:02

In an open letter, SCO boss Darl McBride has publicly berated the open source community for the extended denial of service attacks on the SCO website and called on the community to shun its 'counter-cultural ideals' and join the company in its bid to 'monetize software technology and its underlying intellectual property for all contributors'.

Although McBride used much of the letter to justify SCO's intention to charge a licence for its code that it claims is contained in Linux and to vent his anger at the community closing ranks round whoever is assailing the SCO site with DDOS attacks, the underlying message was for Linux contributors to follow SCO's lead.

'It's time for everyone else in the industry, individuals and small corporations, to understand [that few open source software vendors are profitable] and to implement our own business models - something that keeps us alive and profitable,' he wrote. 'The financial stability of software vendors and the legality of their software products are more important to enterprise customers than free software.'

And the real sticking point would appear to be the commercially restrictive nature of the GPL (GNU General Public Licence) under which open source software is offered. SCO's PR Director Blake Stowell explained: 'Many software vendors have approached SCO to try and find a way to change the GPL or create a different license that wouldn't be so damaging to their business. There are a lot of software vendors that we've spoken to that are extremely afraid of the GPL and would like to see some changes to it.'

Stowell said McBride feels that the open source community is marginalising open source operating systems by touting the GPL licence and is concerned for other areas. 'What will Open Source marginalize next? The database market? Vertical market apps? Darl believes strongly that intellectual property rights in a digital age need to be respected and that we need to retain the value that's been created in software,' he said.

McBride said SCO would continue with its litigation, following up the company's $3bn suit against IBM with SGI as the next likely target. He asserted that 'a Linux developer on the payroll of Silicon Graphics stripped copyright attributions from copyrighted System V code that was licensed to Silicon Graphics under strict conditions of use, and then contributed that source code into Linux as though it was clean code owned and controlled by SGI. This is a clear violation of SGI's contract and copyright obligations to SCO.'

He also used the letter to vent his anger at the open source community in general over attacks to the SCO site. The website has only put in sporadic appearances on the Internet over the past few weeks due to ongoing denial of service attacks from an attacker described by Open Source leader Eric Raymond as 'one of us' (but note that Raymond condemned the attacks).

In the letter McBride said that attacks like this can only cause the open source community to be seen as unfit to manage software upon which global corporates operate their critical systems.

'Until these illegal attacks are brought under control, enterprise customers and mainstream society will become increasingly alienated from anyone associated with this type of behavior,' he wrote. He goes on to recommend the renegade ranks of the community 'follow the rules and procedures that govern mainstream society.'