Website hectors IBM on lawsuit

Primarily, they're cheesed-off at Caldera/SCO, of course. What they're most exercised about are the egregious insults to Linux kernel hackers and the entire Linux community written in SCO's lawsuit against IBM.

In that, they're in good company. It's safe to say that SCO has gravely irritated most of the Linux and Free/Open-Source Software community.

But now they've stepped beyond spirited advocacy, I think. In their most recent article (linked above), Mozillaquest reacts to a response from IBM about the SCO lawsuit by accusing it of corporate stonewalling, and goes so far as to suggest that perhaps IBM has something to hide.

It's a long, over-wrought and very repetitive article that burns up five tedious pages to say that: (1) they asked IBM a bunch of questions about SCO's lawsuit, (2) IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger and PR department gave them the standard sorts of answers companies put about when faced with a lawsuit, and (3) they were disappointed IBM wasn't more forthcoming.

Companies rightly tend to clam up about the issues after being sued. Any lawyer will tell you that business lawsuits aren't won in the press, but are decided in courtrooms. It is only to be expected that IBM won't talk about SCO's allegations, the facts about IBM contributions to Linux, or anything else regarding the case beyond saying it will defend itself.

Implying that IBM must be guilty of something because they won't answer questions from an online journalist about a billion dollar lawsuit seems more than a bit presumptuous. I think that hack owes IBM an apology. µ

See Also
OSI calls for SCO sanctions
SCO to start charging for Unix libraries
SCO not very anti-Linux, at all
SCO acts out of sheer desperation
Linux, the movie