Open Season on Open Source

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Following up on this item:
> 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.

This leads me to another point, a prediction about SCO's strategy.

On the surface this will appear to be a lawsuit.  However, if my comment above
is accurate, then SCO's real strategy has little to do with the lawsuit. 
Their lawyers will *never* publicly reveal the exact lines of code alleged to
be pirated, and the court may or may not require them to do so.

Instead what we will see is a PR campaign to spread the party-line FUD (which
is described fairly well in Hiawatha's article), while deliberately dragging
out the court case (whether it has any merit or not).  The longer the FUD
prevails, the more credibility SCO can muster for itself and any other
companies which ally with it.  If enough others join into an
intellectual-property alliance, critical mass will be achieved to either
develop an OS which can rival Linux in the corporate world, or to at least
remit a large payment to SCO's shareholders, executives and lawyers.

This thing is NOT going away quickly.  Not only the media starts to point out
the obvious hole in the entire strategy:  if no one believes the FUD, there
won't be a story.  If there is no story, SCO's PR campaign will fail.  And
without a PR campaign, the lawsuit can't accomplish anything (win or lose).

In the court, it's heads or tails.  Tails, SCO loses.  Heads, SCO wins.  What
do they win?  An injunction against distribution of pirated code.  At that
point, the court will be required to identify line-by-line what code is
pirated.  The victory for SCO at that point pays no dividends, because they
can't collect any money--just force the freeware community and Linux users to
delete the pirated code and get on with our collective lives.

That's why I am making this open appeal to journalists.  This is not a story;
it's only "open season" if you believe the FUD.  If journalists would simply
dispute the FUD, the story will go away quickly.  (But of course, journalists
have to find SOMETHING to write about after that happens.  Sorry it has to
work out that way.  ;-)

-rich