Not my words … my friend Jim’s.
He pointed me to an article in TechWorld where they obviously omitted a small part of Darl’s statement (the obvious omission is in brackets) …
When people say SCO is just a litigation company, it really bugs me, [and I’ll sue the pants off of anyone who disagrees with me!]
– Darl McBride, CEO of SCO
Of course, the statement that got me was:
McBride also made clear his overriding goal – the destruction of the free software movement: “Wait until the SCO battles are over and let’s see if it’s free or not.” McBride has repeatedly said in the past that free software stifles innovation and harms the IT industry because companies can’t produce great products without any financial return. He continued to rant: “Keep your eye on the [court] filings. Over the coming year, one of the things that you’re going to see is that Big Blue has got big problems.”
Jim comment “that means destruction of the constitutional right of freedom of assembly” … and my only thought was that “People like McBride are against concepts of freedom … they want all the power themselves.”.
I guess McBride (and SCO) is a ‘corporate darwinist’ … he belives in survival of the fittest … ‘course cockroaches have survived for millions of years too.
Think about why eliminating the freedom of assembly is required to acheive “the destruction of the free software movement”. In order to keep free software from being written, a wall must be imposed between interested parties. Where would this wall come from? Traditionally, such walls have been erected in the name of commerce. Since free software is not commerce, there are basically no such walls in place. Congress can regulate commerce between the States (and by extension all other commerce as well). But Congress cannot regulate things such as religion or ideas or most forms of speech. Only when such things become commercial can Congress regulate them.
Much of the genius of the free software movement (and particularly the GPL) lies in its distinctly non-commercial nature. Free software is at its core simply a group of people getting together and talking. That they talk in source code is largely irrelevant. That some of what they talk about has become commercialized is also mostly irrelevant. The commercialized pieces of free software may be regulated, but the movement itself is not commercial – the core of the free software movement is not software: it is the freedom of assembly.
Thus when statements about goals such as “the destruction of the free software movement” are made, the speaker means the goal is to destroy the freedom of assembly. Think about it. Supposing that linux were somehow made illegal and thus ceased to exist. Would that matter? Not really, since a new linux would arise in place of the illegal version. We know that. Companies such as SCO and Microsoft know that. Linux is not the point. The free software movement is the point. The only way to stop a new linux from forming is to stop the free software movement itself; to stop people from getting together and talking.