Mr. Darl McBride President & CEO The SCO Group, inc. I’m new to the Open Source movement and I have a word to you and the world.
You are proposing that the U.S. Government take legal actions against the Open Source Community and the GPL (General Public License) based software, a very serious proposal. You say that this movement has serious implications like: Your nation’s economy may be affected, the ability to lead the world in technological innovation is disappearing, the international competitive position of your country in the global software industry is compromised, and even worst, you presume that it is a national security issue. I’m going to defeat every point that you’ve addressed in the letter that you send to the Honorable on January 8 of 2004. First of all your country, and mine too, is held on capitalism and it’s true that Linux is making a revolution in the software industry and it represents a threat for companies based on copyright model like yours. One of the biggest believes of capitalism is that people must have choices, monopoly is against it (like you actually do), and it seems that you are proposing a kind of one, aren’t you? People must have choices, Open Source is a very good one, and most important it’s made with the efforts of many volunteers around the world, people who wanted a better OS. In the book “Business at Speed of Thought”, Bill Gates remarks that companies must on providing value added services (Alvin Toffler said that too in the Third Wave, and Michael Dell), those that do not stick to it will die in the in the middle of the way. Companies must focus on deliver services rather than products and your company isn’t doing it well as I can tell. You must face that UNIX age has come to its end, like DOS, and there is nothing that you can’t do about it. If the whole world is adopting Linux, it is definitely, the world’s choice, my choice. A choice that the U.S. Constitution protects (Remember Microsoft’s case?), and again, also my country and the U.S.M. Constitution. If U.S. looses the technological lead, which I don’t see it coming, other countries are in his own right to take that lead. U.S. is not the only country that matters; you are not alone in here, we all live here on planet Earth (Yes, the pretty blue one, have seen it?). It is time that U.S. stop trying to protect their industry at all costs, usually in an unilateral way. Linux is not a real threat, it’s a challenge, it’s a revolution on software industry, it’s the consolidation of the services era whether it affects you or not. Because software is knowledge that digital society needs. The software is accumulative and it can’t be well developed if there’s blocked pieces protected by copyright patents, technological growth will be stalled if free software wouldn’t exists. Let me give you some examples of this: Informix came from a free object relational database system named POSTGRESQL; Macintosh also came from another UNIX like OS, the Free BSD; the most powerful and used web server is Apache which is used by the biggest search engine Google (Which also is based in FreeBSD). So, it isn’t true that software industry will collapse with Open Source but to let people like me develop better and free software. Linux is not a threat for the software industry, it’s just changing it. At my work we still use Microsoft Tech, HP UX, Solaris and Linux. Isn’t this a message to you and your company that you must change the way of doing business? HP has made a fast move providing Linux solutions, IBM, Red Hat is another one, Novell is taking that way too and they are taking the lead, all them American companies (and now against you). So it is not true that your country may lose the industry lead. They are not out of business but you. I’m not an expert in this matters, but the use of my common sense tells me that Linux is a smart move for many companies, specially for countries in ways of development. SCO Group should change the way to see things; this is not the way of winning new customers (forcing and threat them to not use Linux) but to aid with new enemies, isn’t enough MYDOOM attacks to your corporate web site to realize it! Iván Torres A proudly Linux user! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]