Open Source, open letter, open warfare

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 11 Sep 2003 at 11:47

Open Source leaders Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens have responded to SCO's open letter with one of their own - refusing SCO's call for the new business model for Linux and denying the company any part in the platform's future.

The letter pulls no punches. It accuses SCO's CEO Darl McBride of scribing a 'farrago of falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, slanders, and misrepresentations.'

At the heart of both letters is whether the GPL is a fit model under which to distribute Linux.

McBride wrote that it was time for vendors to 'implement our own business models - something that keeps us alive and profitable... The financial stability of software vendors and the legality of their software products are more important to enterprise customers than free software.'

Raymond and Perens think otherwise, calling the warranties for proprietary software offered by the likes of SCO and Microsoft 'shams designed to lull users into a false sense of security,' that are 'carefully worded so that the vendor's liability is limited to the software purchase price.'

It is precisely the open philosophy of Open Source software that makes it accountable, assert Raymond and Perens. 'Our source code is public, exposed to scrutiny by anyone who wishes to contest its ownership,' they write. '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.'

They also suggested that SCO's own history of IP shenanigans is not beyond reproach: 'SCO should clean up its own act before daring to accuse others of theft,' they wrote - referring to SCO saying it was merging GPL software into its Unix product.

The leaders deny there is anything to negotiate over regarding the GPL, and that SCO shall have no part in Linux's future.

'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.'

They call on SCO to show the code and vow to replace any areas of infringement or prove that it entered Linux in such a way that SCO can have no claim on it.

But aside from such galvanising words to the community, it seems unfortunate that Raymond and Perens should play-up to McBride's notion that the Open Source community harboured 'counter-cultural ideals,' by referring to them as 'hackers'.

Particularly given the accusations flying back and forth that the perpetrator of denial of service attacks on the SCO site originated from someone in the Open Source community and that the community was closing ranks around this individual.

Raymond had said previously that he had been contacted by a person who described the attacker as 'one of us'. However he maintained he was never in possession of the attacker's identity.

In fact Raymond asserts that once he had been told of the association of the attacker, he called for the attacks to stop, which they did. He claims to have subsequently received an email of thanks from SCO's PR Director Blake Stowell.

'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,' reads the letter.