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August 23, 2003

The Thump Thump Thump of Little Chieftain Chests


If there's one thing I miss about being in the thick of the whole Linux thing, it's being on the mailing list for communiques from assorted warlords and potentates of open source software. Eric Raymond, who's been building up a head of steam over the past few months thanks to the SCO thing, finally boils over. I'm imagining a fur-clad hill chieftain coming down from the highlands to batter his hide-covered shield with a big stick while yelling "Angk! Angk! Araaaaangk!"

"Linus Torvalds is backing me on this, and our other chieftains and philosopher-princes will as well. Show us the overlaps. If your code has been inserted in our work, we'll remove it — not because you've threatened us but because that's the right thing to do, whether the patches came from IBM or anywhere else. Then you can call off your lawyers and everyone will get to go home happy.

"Take that offer while you still can, Mr. McBride. So far your so-called ‘evidence’ is [redacted]; you'd better climb down off your high horse before we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you. How you finish the contract fight you picked with IBM is your problem. As the president of OSI, defending the community of open-source hackers against predators and carpetbaggers is mine — and if you don't stop trying to destroy Linux and everything else we've worked for I guarantee you won't like what our alliance is cooking up next.

[...]

"You have a choice. Peel off that dark helmet and deal with us like a reasonable human being, or continue down a path that could be bad trouble for us but will be utter ruin — quite possibly including jail time on fraud, intellectual-property theft, barratry, and stock-manipulation charges — for you and the rest of SCO's top management. You have my email, you can have my phone if you want it, and you have my word of honor that you'll get a fair hearing for any truths you have to offer."

Here's the whole screed.

Posted by mph at August 23, 2003 05:08 PM

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