A little behind

SCO.

I haven’t blogged about them, because I have nothing much to offer besides invective, of which there is already plenty to go around.

Professor Felten, thought, has an important point in a post from yesterday:

Conventional wisdom about the SCO/IBM dustup is that it demonstrates a serious flaw in the open-source model—an asserted lack of “quality control” on open-source code that leaves end users open to potential copyright and patent infringement suits. If any pimply-faced teenager can contribute code to open-source projects, how can you be sure that that code isn’t copyrighted or patented by somebody?

Assuming that SCO’s charges are correct, the moral of the story is not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, to avoid software that comes from pimply-faced teenagers. Quite the contrary. The moral is to be wary of software from big, established companies like IBM. In SCO’s story, the pimply-faced teenagers are bystanders – the gray-haired guys in expensive suits are the crooks.

I agree. Whatever happens in this case strengthens the argument for the use of free software.

If SCO loses, they will lose at least in part because Linux is open for examination by anyone, and this means there is an army of a million eyeballs to examine their claims. If SCO were to complain about a proprietary product, there would be no such army.

And even if SCO wins, even if their claim to a whopping 0.003% of the kernel is upheld, and even if they are somehow granted ownership control of the whole kernel as a result, and then proceed to declare that they will not ship any more Linux and Linux is dead, the position of Linux users is secure. Especially enterprise users—because what makes our position secure is our ability to work on the code ourselves, or pay others to do so, in secret if need be. To put it in Marxian terms, we own the factory, not a widget. We can make more widgets, and whatever SCO says or does, we will keep that power, until they send the lawyers to each and every one of us to pry the keyboards from our cold, dead hands.

Filed under: technology/linux