One of the greatest villains walking the earth right now

[Krug]

Darl McBride of SCO who has undermined the whole Open Source movement and used lawsuits to hide behind and threaten the whole Linux community.

Pure evil doesn't just walk the earth as a terrorist or some axe-wielding nut.

You can read the arrogant b*******'s letter and the response from the Linux community here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32798.html

Accordingly, we of the open-source community do not concede that there is anything to negotiate. 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.


Bravo.

 

[Darkness]

Moved to Software.

 

[Wurm1234]

Pure evil doesn't just walk the earth as a terrorist or some axe-wielding nut.

Oh, puleeeeeze.

 

[Tsyr]

Oh, puleeeeeze.

ditto.

I'm a linux user. But this is only pointing out a lot of the problems I've always had with the community.

And if they CAN prove their claims they are justified in their objections. They have not yet proven them, though, so I withold judgement.

 

[MJEggertson]

The SCO thing is worse, but also evil is that lawsuit by Eolas Technologies (and to some extent the University of California) against Microsoft (ref).

Briefly, they took a technology that had existed for about ten years, modified the wording of it a bit and managed to get a patent, and are now suing Microsoft for about a half billion dollars for infringing on 'their' patent. The whole principle of it makes me angry, and is a prime example of what is wrong with American patent laws. I know people who have been severely screwed by the backwards patent laws in the US, and stuff like this just yanks my chain. Worse is, after Microsoft, they may (or may not) go after every company/organization that makes modern web-browsers. This lawsuit doesn't make the news much, probably because they have yet to go up against the open source community who would not take this sitting down, whereas it's probably in Microsoft's best interest to keep it relatively quiet, not to mention the public doesn't seem to care much about Microsoft legalities anymore after the whole USA vs Microsoft case...

 

[Hollywood]

While I think Mr. McBride's actions are of a "SCO needs money, this how we'll go about it" type, it does have some validity if the allegations are actually true. And as Tyr notes, does highlight a serious problem in the "open source" community since most folks contributing generally have day jobs and may take code written for or they are exposed for, remove copyrights and add some obsufication to it and contribute it. It happens and the only thing that can be done is to remove the code and write a replacement for it.

That all being said, Mr. McBride also tends to equate Open Source with Linux and Linux only (actually the "President of Open Source" has the same view too), which is of course not the case... look at Apache for solid open-source written from ground-up. IP and copyrights [which are automatically granted to all work, but only by having a copyright statement on the work can it be letigated (er something like that I was told by the company lawyer when asking about it for code purposes)] must be protected, whether they are from closed or open source.

And yes MJEggerston, I agree. There have been other cases like this too where blatantly unpatentable crap has been given a patent and may effect the entire industry. I forget who, but some little unknown company, put together some patents and went after Yahoo and eBay recently. The patten laws have to be updated here in the States and they have to be explicit. In this case you are referring to, and the Yahoo/eBay case its nothing but simple attempts at thievery.

 

[Fast Learner]

Oh, puleeeeeze.

Ditto.