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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
While a small Utah company launches a frontal assault on free software, the rest of the globe is saying: Gimme some of that!
Dec 22, 2003 | On Dec. 4, Darl McBride, CEO of the SCO Group, unleashed the latest of his periodic broadsides attacking the world of Linux and open-source software.
"There really is no middle ground," wrote McBride. "The future of the global economy hangs in the balance."
The SCO Group is the Linden, Utah, outfit whose yearlong lawsuit against IBM has riveted the attention of the software universe. The company has inflamed the passions of thousands of open-source software developers by committing to a strategy of tarring Linux, which IBM supports commercially and which SCO representatives claim was a depository for misappropriated Unix source code licensed by SCO to IBM.
Labeling the political philosophy and legal strategies of the free-software movement "ill-founded" and "contrary to [the U.S.] system of copyright and patent laws," McBride has been unafraid to frame his company's legal battle as an all-or-nothing crusade. His bold statements are a major reason that the SCO-vs.-IBM battle has dominated open-source news coverage throughout 2003. Looking back at the "year in open source," it might even seem that SCO was the only story anyone was paying attention to.
But while it's true that the SCO-IBM battle does have long-term legal implications -- a victory on SCO's part would certainly jeopardize the popularity of Linux as a low-cost software tool for U.S. and European information technology (IT) departments -- extending those implications to the world at large hits a stumbling block as soon as you consider the other major open-source storyline of 2003.
Here's a brief recap: In March, the same month SCO filed its lawsuit, a Japanese daily newspaper, Nihon Keizai, revealed that more than 100 Asian software developers were meeting in Thailand to lay the groundwork for an Asian offshoot of Linux. In September, the month McBride launched his first open letter, which attacked "structural flaws" in the Linux development process, technology ministers from China and Korea confirmed joint plans to underwrite the earlier-mentioned localized version of Linux in the hopes of building a regional wireless network capable of supporting 200 million low-cost (that is, Linux-powered) devices.
And finally, in November, as McBride was preparing his latest open letter, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy announced to a Las Vegas Comdex audience that his company had forged a deal with the Chinese government to ship up to 1 million desktop versions of the Java Desktop System -- Java tools bundled with Linux and the open-source StarOffice application suite -- by the end of 2004, a deal that, when completed, would automatically make Sun a front-runner in the Linux desktop market.
"That's not the only opportunity," boasted McNealy, alluding to similar upcoming deals. "We're out calling on every [technology] ministry on the planet."
In other words, what we have here are two diverging storylines. In one, the future of open source is in jeopardy or, at the very least, a cause of division among corporations. In the other, open source is becoming a unifier of markets, governments and the companies eager to serve both. These warring realities offer as much proof as one could beg for that free software is relevant to today's technology sector. And McBride is right -- the future of the global economy is at stake. But as far as a vast portion of the world is concerned, SCO's CEO is fighting for the wrong side.
