Posted on 02/02/2004 7:48:10 PM PST by mikegi
Industry watcher Rob Enderle no longer responds to angry e-mails from Linux supporters. The principal analyst for the Enderle Group (San Jose, Calif.) says he replied to the first thousand or so. But after that, the anger and profanities that many of the missives contained began to wear on him.
"I've been threatened and other analysts have been threatened, as well," Enderle said. "Some of the e-mail is incredibly vile, and it just doesn't seem worth it to respond anymore. The senders view a response as a license to write again, in even greater detail."
Enderle's experience is part of a new phenomenon that has swept the upstart Linux operating system from feel-good, groundswell enthusiasm to an ugly environment of death threats and electronic terrorism — from Woodstock to Altamont, if you will. The rising tide of emotion is partially rooted in the SCO Group Ltd.'s billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM Corp., but experts say it also reflects the changing ranks of the open-source faithful. ....
(Excerpt) Read more at eet.com ...
I hate it when that happens.
When dBase IV stank on ice they sued the clone companies for copyright infringement, despite the underlying code being in the public domain.
Lots of programmers boycotted their product. Some lost business from companies that spec'd dBase code, and refused Foxbase.
There is no legal or moral way for people today to strike back at SCO, it must be left to IBMs lawyers and that isn't very satisfying.
Frustrating, very frustrating.
So9
There's good evidence that a lot of SCO's supposed UNIX property is also in the public domain. There was never a ruling on the precedent case for this, but it was settled with a strong indication from the court that it was public domain.
True Linux supporters, Weber said, are devoted to the free sharing of software. "They believe Microsoft's products are technically flawed," he noted. "They are almost religious in the belief that sharing code is a better way to build software. And they won't compromise that belief."
In some cases, however, the sense of sharing and camaraderie that is supposed to characterize Linux has been superceded by an over-the-top zeal, with the SCO Group being the target of the worst of it
Attempting to underscore his dislike of hate email, he leaves the reader with the impression that 1 in 10 Linux users as radicals engaging in illegal type activities boardering on terrorism.
His conclusion that this will keep business from adopting Linux is not an interpretation of facts (as none are presented), only his bias.
Wait a minute. I know 9 other people who use Linux. They seem like pretty nice guys.
IT MUST BE ME!!!
No, wait, one of them must be a closet terrorist. No more LUG meetings for me. I'm going to quit before I become a fanatic. Not like those people.
Reminds me of an old Jeff Stilson joke: "I read the other day that 1 out 4 people in San Francisco are gay. You know what that means? It means that if you're in SF with three other guys and none of them are gay, YOU ARE!"
You just don't know the history, do you? Okay, they are not officially in the public domain, but for all purposes of usage they are. This was established in a lawsuit over them where the judge threw out a preliminary injunction to stop distributing software with those files as the case was without merit except for claim on six files. But the case was settled before any final ruling could be made, with only about three of 18,000 files having to be removed to comply with copyright.
The other 17,997 files are freely redistributable with no royalties and no GPL-like terms, and they comprise quite a bit of UNIX that SCO claims to own. McBride claims that he knows which files are covered as free under that closed settlement, and SCO isn't suing over those, but I wouldn't trust his statements much since he's even claimed ownership of files Linus Torvalds wrote himself over 10 years ago and even files containing lists of standard error codes.
He has also grossly failed to comply with the judge's order on IBM's motion to compel to finally state exactly what code is infringing. You would think that if I claimed copyright infringement against you on something I wrote that I would at least produce the text for which I am claiming infringement. If I refused to produce the text, wouldn't you think I'm lying? Would you just take my word for it that you are infringing?
SCO has patents? on Unix? I'm wondering whether to take this article seriously now.
When SCO was accused of fabricating the story of its attacks, it hired the University of San Diego's Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, to verify the event. When the association did so, it too was hit with a denial-of-service attack.
"We were attacked, we were attacked for saying we were attacked and then the agency who said we were attacked got attacked," noted a spokesman for SCO Group.
Oooh, look at all of those scars... and Netcraft also somewhat agreed with you, but they didn't get "attacked", did they?
Still, the attacks on SCO Group have at times gone beyond the bounds of the computer world. The company spokesman said that SCO executives' lives have been threatened. When SCO Group chief executive officer Darl McBride appeared at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas in November to deliver a keynote speech at CD Expo, the company brought a sharpshooter along for protection.
And why is it that the local police are never notified about these "death threats"? Maybe because the cops would demand evidence that the threat was real?
It's interesting that this sympathetic PR piece is directed to non-programmers, as usual. Never a mention of how SCO is screwing up its own lawsuit, how their "evidence" is ripped apart, how the SCO brass is milking the company's investors, how the promises of end-user invoices and lawsuits keep getting pushed back...
No. It's "Poor SCO. Those nasty Linux punks are spoiling all of the fun." Awwww....
Because filing a fraudulent police report is a crime (just ask the bozo who came up with the lost-lottery-ticket scam last month).
Apparently he has made a career of twisting the tails of anybody who isn't Microsoft (which has been financing the SCO lawsuit, which Enderle uniquely among analysts (!)) so not only the Linux jihadis but also the Mac mujahideen call him kufr.
In the same article I cited above, Enderle admits that he paid scant attention to Linux until the SCO suit.
Enderle has also written in the past that open source software is a threat to national security. (Which I guess, proves his point that he's been paying scant attention to it).
In other Linux/SCO FUD today, Darl McBride visited locally (Harvard). He was kind of made a monkey of by Harvard and MIT students. In an exchange with one student, he blamed the MyDoom.A virus on the linux community, and asked if anyone had been victimised by the virus.
"Naw," the student replied. "I run Linux."
Da-bump BUMP.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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