Re: Blake Stowell said Linux ABI is not infringing!

From: Tony Lawrence (apl_at_shell01.TheWorld.com)
Date: 12/27/03 

Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 12:42:35 +0000 (UTC)

Joe Dunning <joe@blahblah.invalid> wrote:

>Once again, I ask the fence-sitters: at what point do you actively
>DISBELIEVE SCO's claims? Surely any doubt that SCO's management are
>lying has to have gone now?

What difference does that make?

You know, you seem to see this as some war between us
and you. We have to join your bitter hatred of all things SCO,
or we're the enemy.

Here's what I "believe": SCO management looks like a bunch of
incompetent boobs at this point. That could change tomorrow,
or they could smear more egg on their faces. Either way, it
doesn't really matter, because what matters is what happens
with this lawsuit, and what REALLY matters is how it all
affects Linux and open source going forward.

As to this imaginary fence you have put up, it doesn't
exist. It's impossible for me to have any opinion about
the validity of SCO's IP claims or about the likelihood
of any particular legal strategy being successful. That's
not a fence: that's simple in the dark ignorance.

You want me to "take sides". Against what? Against who
wins this stupid lawsuit? If you want me to say who I
WANT to win, that's easy: I want Linux to win. But that's
desire, Joe. Just a personal desire, and no matter how
many people may share it, no matter how much nonsense they
babble about the GPL, pump and dump schemes, etc. it
doesn't matter: reality will be whatever it is. And
by reality I do NOT mean any reality of who owns what code,
but rather the political reality of who wins the suit, and
(again much more importantly) what the longer term political
effect is. That's the important reality, and if I were
just half smart enough to know what that will be, I'd
be rich a million times over.

To me, you sound like a rabid baseball fan ranting on and
on about the other team and demanding that I take a side
on who will win the pennant. I know nothing about baseball,
and more importantly, I don't care. The analogy is imperfect
because I do care about the larger issues that surround this
issue, but I'm neither a SCO fan or a SCO hater: I'm
just a guy who makes some of his living from the products
they sell.

>From the strict and narrow viewpoint (forgetting
the larger picture of what I think is right for the
world), I don't care at all whether SCO wins or loses: all
I care about is my clients. And that is driven primarily by
a selfish desire to survive. Don't twist that out of context:
I have moral considerations in those relationships, but the
origin of those relationships is financial.
 
In the larger view, I do believe that Open Source and Linux
are the right path for the world, and I don't like those
who are trying to prevent that. However, I recognize that this
is a political opinion, and that there are arguments to be
made for proprietary, patented, copyrighted, locked up
commercial software.

There's no fence. 

-- 
tony@aplawrence.com Unix/Linux/Mac OS X  resources: http://aplawrence.com
Get paid for writing about tech: http://aplawrence.com/publish.html

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