Open Season on Open Source?

[Rich Braun]

"Hungry Profiteer" <b40xcvq1 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hiawatha Bray has an article on the opening page of the Business
> section in today's Boston Globe, entitled "Open Season on Open
> Source".
>
> In addition, the article has no information ...

Perhaps you could pause your message right there with that last phrase.  (It's
only slightly an exaggeration, but the point is that the article has no *new*
information that hasn't been rehashed a hundred times by other media.) I hope
Hiawatha is on this mailing list and is reading this thread.

One obvious point that I think should be made by journalists covering the
issue:  there have been many cases of intellectual-property rights being
asserted in the freeware community (one famous case that I recall had to do
with file compression utilities about 10 years ago), and the freeware
community has its own not-so-secret weapon that has always worked against the
profiteers.

Code around it, under it, through it, or over it.

The lawyers simply cannot grab hold of this jello; it'll slip through their
fingers as fast as Torvalds and his 10,000 volunteers can code up a workaround
to whatever alleged pirated code is rooted out and identified by the SCO legal
beagles.  If 998 of the Fortune 1000 are found to be running pirated code,
they'll be running a patched un-pirated version by this time next Sunday.

Rock, paper, scissors.  Rock!

-rich