Microsoft may be the only winner in SCO's lawsuit against IBM and
the open source ideal.
Last week I wrote about the rather ironic historical background to
Caldera/SCO's lawsuit against IBM, and the fact that the company
behind the legal moves was one of the earliest supporters of
GNU/Linux.
In this context,
the
detailed complaint is an extraordinary document. Some of its
claims are amusing: "Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the
software equivalent of a bicycle. Unix was the software equivalent
of a luxury car. To make Linux good enough for use by enterprise
customers, it must be redesigned so that it also becomes the
software equivalent of a luxury car."
The idea that operating systems are the equivalent of
petrol-guzzling limousines, presumably complete with TVs and
cocktail bars, gives an interesting insight into SCO's design
philosophy.
Amusement aside, some of the document's statements are just plain
wrong: "The primary purpose of the GNU organisation is to create
free software based on valuable commercial software. The primary
operating system advanced by GNU is Linux."
The founder of the
GNU project and
the associated Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman,
intentionally never looked at Unix code, and used only its
published interfaces. The operating system that GNU advances is
built around the
Hurd
kernel even though the GNU/ Linux combination is used more
widely.
The document goes on to say, "In order to assure that the Linux
operating system (and other software) would remain free-of-charge
and not-for-profit, GNU created a licensing agreement entitled the
General Public License." In fact, the first GNU GPL was formulated
in 1985 to protect the
Emacs program
written by Stallman. Linus Torvalds only started coding what became
his Linux kernel in 1991.
These are inaccuracies of fact; more profound are the
mischaracterisations of the whole open source process. "As long as
the Linux development process remained unco-ordinated and random,
it posed little or no threat to SCO, or to other Unix vendors."
This shows a deep ignorance of the entire distributed development
approach of open source software that is its greatest strength. The
implication that when IBM came along it was able to co-ordinate the
"random" coding betrays a complete lack of knowledge as to how the
free software community functions.
Following on the heels of this kind of error, it is no surprise
that the crucial argument that is designed to bolster SCO's case
against IBM manages to top everything that has come before by
combining inaccuracy with insult: "It is not possible for Linux to
rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise
functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or
concepts to achieve such performance, and co-ordination by a larger
developer, such as IBM."
This conveniently ignores 20 years of open source innovation, to
say nothing of the whole
history and ethos of free software.
The underlying idea is close in spirit to comments directed towards
the hacker community many years ago: "Most of you steal your
software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to
share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?" Those
words were written in 1976 by Bill Gates in his famous
"open letter to hobbyists". Back then, they had little effect,
but today his company is already benefiting from SCO's
action.
Microsoft sees its main rival, IBM, faced with a potentially costly
and damaging lawsuit. It finds the Unix world once again plunging
into internecine struggle - precisely the situation that first
allowed Windows NT to make inroads into the enterprise. But most of
all, seeds of doubt are being sown about the legal position of
GNU/Linux, however unjustified, and in a way that no blame can be
attached to Microsoft.