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Our Blogs Open Sauce Some lessons from the SCO debacle
Our Blogs Open Sauce Some lessons from the SCO debacle | Some lessons from the SCO debacle |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 18 September 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 2 The main lesson that the SCO debacle should teach - and I use the word should advisedly - is that FOSS developers, who are often painted as some kind of rabble, understand intellectual property and actually understand it damn well. There may be fights over licensing when someone or the other tries to indulge in a bit of sneaky byplay but those altercations are resolved over time. There is no question of any FOSS company trying to make its money by claiming to have IP which it never owned. (It is interesting to note that the trend which SCO set in motion in 2003 is continuing in a different form with patent trolls; one of the prime examples of this way of extracting money is Monsanto's claim on certain porcine genes and its bid to make pig farmers around the world pay a royalty for breeding the animals.) But only a very foolhardy software company will try to go where SCO ventured. The whole landscape for spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about so-called intellectual property has been basically laid waste. While software companies have to learn this lesson, there is also a good deal that cheer squads at various technology publications have to digest. There is much talk in the community about the media being "balanced" - or "fair and balanced" - but a lot of it is so much tosh. Would any writer who pens a piece about the Holcaust include a quote from someone like David Irving to provide so-called "balance"? Or would someone wading through bits of bodies in the Sabra and Shattila refugee camps be expected to get a perspective from the Lebanese Phalangist militia to provide the other side of the story? When it comes to reporting, one tends to concur with the idea of balance; but when is reporting done in the style which it should be? All those tech outlets which gave the SCO propaganda merchants tons of web, video and audio time - what are they doing now that the boot is well and truly on the other foot?. The ability to think critically was chucked out of the window and the issue was all but decided by these outlets. (But then that shouldn't surprise any keen observer - the same thing happened all over again, this time with the general media, when the push to invade Iraq was on.) One is yet to see anything even remotely approaching the hype which these purveyors of dubious information indulged in when SCO went to court. Now that SCO's fangs have been removed and the company reduced to a non-entity, all we get is a few paragraphs buried in some corner of the site. One would expect a simple "I was wrong" from many of the so-called luminaries of the technology press but I doubt that anyone will be putting out a statement like that. Instead we get the Rumsfeldian type of excuse: "The SCO Group's gamble was that it didn't have the financial strength to survive losing. 'To do this, SCO needed to focus 100 per cent of their effort... and SCO simply refused to do that'." This gem is from Rob Enderle as reported in the Salt Lake Tribune. You won't get the kind of direct speech which Linus Torvalds employed some years when told that SCO's Darl McBride was claiming that the Linux kernel contained a million lines of infringing code. With admirable economy of words, the Finn replied: "He's lying." |
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