First Draft of An Open Letter to the Linux Community re: SCO v. IBM. -------------------------------------------------------------------- by Max Blanco The roots of this project we call "linux" are in Finland. It was tended by a theretofore unknown programmer that goes by the name of "Linus Torvalds". As the story has been told to me, Mr. Torvalds knew three things about how he wanted to subvert the UNICes of the day: 1) he wanted it to look and feel similar to "The Real Thing"TM; 2) he wanted it to be "free"; 3) he knew NOTHING at all about how the internals of the code worked. The third point was the key: as he knew nothing about how the code worked, he could set up what we now know as an Request-for-Comments (RFC) process. He knew the BEHAVIOUR of the system, a type of indirection named, in electrical engineering terms, after two electrical engineers: Mr. Thevenin and Mr. Norton. You can find out more about these two gentlemen, to whom are devoted the majority of second-year EE courses at <http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/thevenin.html> and <http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/norton.html>. Devices of this type are also known as "black boxes". Mr. Torvalds *isolated himself* (not too difficult in wintertime Finland, I should think!) and came up with a novel implementation, or flavour, of UNIX. An example may be in order at this point to concretize your thoughts. I will use the example of the "ls" command. At every point in an operating system's (OS's) life to date, a human being (man) must interface with the computer to query the contents of the filesystem with which he interfaces. The input the man gives to the computer is known as "ls" (and appropriate command line switches; see "man ls" for these). The output by the OS to the screen is organized in columnar, alphabetized fashion. A typical example might look like this: [root at gloucester: ~/perlsnippets] % <--rest state [root at gloucester: ~/perlsnippets] % ls <--input fix.nov.pl fixofman.pl <--output fixbfaut.pl takemailaddresses.pl <--output [root at gloucester: ~/perlsnippets] % <--rest state Mr. Torvalds did NOT know how one of the original development teams of UNIX accomplished this feat, but he did know the iputs and outputs of the "ls" system. By replicating the entire UNIX tree, he eventually had a working flavour of UNIX. This OS was baptized "linux" when it was released in the early 1990s. Fast forward to 2003. International Bussiness Machines (IBM), the progenitor of the system on which linux was developed and one of the largest global corporations, belatedly has noticed this free software effort and is preying on its success. The suits at IBM know a good thing when they see it: they need to reduce costs, and a free OS is hard to resist. The fact that many of IBM's corporate clients have noticed this linux OS is another reason to hop on the bandwagon. That the suits at IBM have not been the only ones to notice linux is witnessed by the following excerpt: " In March of this year, The SCO Group (formerly Caldera International) announced that they intend to seek damages from IBM, claiming that IBM had released code included in the Linux kernel that was actually their Intellectual Property. "(CLIC press release, August 23, 2003) The Canadian Linux Interests Coalition (CLIC) has been formed as of August 22, 2003 "to refute SCO's claims against Linux and Linux Users everywhere". Corporations exist to funnel lucre to their shareholders while maintaining a cushy job for their own corporate managers. Corporations--fictive bodies all--must employ lawyers if they are to exist. Lawsuits are instigated to achieve the aims of corporations; this is one possible means for lawyers to justify their existence. Corporations can be seen to exist as life support systems for the benefit of certain lawyers. (Corporations cannot "exist" in a literal--by this I mean physically real--sense.) This can be contrasted with inter-personal (i.e. man-to-man) relationships, in which the overriding object is to avoid courts of law. The development of "linux" was free of lawsuits until recently. The development of "linux" was free of corporations until recently. The development of "linux" had been a cottage industry, in which physically real individuals had contributed code to the "linux" community, since its inception. No longer is this the case. With the permission granted by natural persons to allow artificial or fictive bodies to contribute to the "linux" community, a snake was introduced to their eden. The inception of lawsuits over linux has its roots intermixed inextricably with the onset of the onslaught of corporations. Corporations "exist" to shield human beings from liability. The lawsuit which CLIC was formed to address is a battle between two corporations. I should be remiss if I failed to bring this to your notice. The lawsuit apparently involves 27 lines of code, which the SCO Group maintains IBM "stole" *and contributed to* the linux code base. No natural person in full possession of his senses would have ever performed such a feat of happy-enstance. IMHO, this whole mess can be best avoided if the linux project is returned to its roots by its contributors: an RFC process documenting the prescribed inputs and desired outputs should be given to a programmer with no prior knowledge of the 27 lines of contested code; His creation will be free of legal encumbrance. Let the legal fictions battle in court. I have no interest in seeing the linux code base polluted by the actions of fictive legal bodies. The whole linux community should exclude forevermore contributions by fictive legal bodies, through democratic vote if need be. The list of kernel contributors is known. IBM, along with its employees, would have one voice. The same distribution of voices would prevail for other fictive legal bodies. Perhaps the human, natural, person will, upon reading this document, agree with me to save this linux project from embroilment with legal fictions. The ideal result would be to have natural pesons who contribute to the development of the linux code base proscribe contributions from artificial persons. The institution of a Thevenin-Norton-Torvalds RFC process to solve this fictive impasse may be one of the avenues possible to return this idyll to its natural state: a cottage industry in which natural persons contribute to the weal of the whole community. --30-- -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml