SCO feeds the IT industry trolls

It's not helpful that some industry analysts, certain pundits, and a few paid shills are leaping at opportunities to climb on SCO's careening bandwagon and gleefully bash GNU and Linux as well as Open Source software in general.

One can't take the IT industry analysts very seriously. After all, they're in the business of hedging their bets. Gartner Group writing to its clients that, in view of SCO's allegations, they might want to think twice about using Linux in large "mission critical" systems is just, well... Gartner being Gartner. Same goes for Meta, Giga, Forrester, et al. Such equivocation from analysts is hardly anything new, it's their stock in trade. Most IT managers routinely ignore analysts anyway, unless they need a quote that supports their agenda and beliefs.

But columnists don't have IT industry analysts' motivations, and they all should know better.

Take Charles Cooper's column at C|Net and ZDnet for example. He says, "The unauthorized incorporation of intellectual property (IP) is an obvious no-no in the real world, where laws and rules of behavior govern the limits of fair use. In contrast, the open-source world is a veritable swap mart where source code remains freely distributed and available to the general public. With the General Public License (GPL), anyone can see, change and distribute an application's source code, so long as they publish any changes they make before distributing it."

I've got to hand it to him: few writers can so completely misrepresent two major disciplines that are relevant and timely within the IT industry so thoroughly in a single paragraph.

First, he uses the term "intellectual property" as though that means a single doctrine, whereas actually it's a catchall term for the combination of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Those are all different and are subject to differing laws and regulations. Yet he manages to imply that they are all subject to Fair Use, but that's an exclusion specific only to copyright.

Second, he manages to equate open source with "available to the general public," which is not what the vast majority of, and most commonly employed, open source licenses state and mean.

Third, he misrepresents the requirements of the GNU General Public License in writing that it makes demands on developers to publish source code changes and do so prior to distribution. The GPL doesn't have either of these requirements. Instead, what it does require is that source code changes must be provided to those who receive the software, usually either along with the distribution itself or, in the case of some Open Source licenses, made available upon request.

Cooper then proceeds to attack Linus Torvalds for not wanting to know about patents, which is the only reasonable approach for any engineer. If engineers spent their time searching for and reading patents, they wouldn't have any time for engineering. Engineers are also held harmless for designs they develop independently, but can be "tainted" and prevented from working in an area entirely if they've seen any related patents. Also, many patents are not enforced, and many others are cross-licensed between companies. Finally, patent law is complex, which is why firms have patent attorneys in addition to engineers. And Cooper again muddles patents together with copyrights and then persists in conflating the two by using the amorphous, generic term "IP".

Other commentators stirring up FUD have visible ties to Microsoft, such as Richard Wilder. He's an attorney for the Association for Competitive Technology, a Microsoft lobbying group busted for blatant astroturfing during the Vole's Antitrust trial. C|Net ran a column of his last week in which he attempted to throw anti-Linux FUD into the minds of corporate managers, based upon threats SCO brandished in letters sent to the 1500 largest companies.

If you haven't been following this IT industry soap opera, scripted by and starring The SCO Group, and you'd like real information instead of SCO-inspired FUD, I cannot recommend a better resource than the Unix and Linux communities' collaborative grass-roots IWeThey Wiki on SCO vs IBM.

It's not a completely comprehensive archive of commentary and links (for example, documents available as PDFs on SCO's website and in tiff format at the court in Utah are not included or linked), but it's well structured (for a Wiki), refreshingly intelligent, and extensive. µ