[plug] Excellent ESR rant on TSG

[Leon Brooks]

    http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/08/22/1746248.shtml?tid=19

    Late yesterday I learned that you have charged that your company
    is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM.
    You have urged the press and public to believe that the Open
    Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat
    and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are up in arms not
    because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because little
    gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. /Bwahahaha! Fire up
    the orbital mind-control lasers!/

    Very few things could possibly illustrate the brain-boggling
    disconnect between SCO and reality with more clarity than
    hearing you complain about how persecuted your company is. You
    opened this ball on 6 March by accusing the open-source
    community of criminality and incompetence as a way to set up a
    lawsuit against IBM. You have since tried to seize control of
    our volunteer work for your company's exclusive gain, and your
    lawyers have announced the intention to destroy not just the
    GPL but all the open-source licenses on which our community is
    built. It's beyond me how can have the gall to talk as though
    we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against
    you. IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!

    I'm not sure which possibility is more pathetic - that the CEO
    of SCO is lying through his teeth for tactical reasons, or that
    you genuinely aren't capable of recognizing honest outrage when
    you see it. To a manipulator, all behaviors are manipulation.
    To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy. Is that you?
    Have you truly forgotten that people might make common cause
    out of integrity, ethical considerations, or simple
    self-defense? Has the reality you inhabit truly become so
    cramped and ugly?

    I'm in at least semi-regular communication with most of the
    people and organizations who are causing you problems right
    now. The only conspiracy among us is the common interest in
    preventing the open-source community from being destroyed by
    SCO's greed and desperation.

    [...]

    /Editor's note: The opinions in this article are strictly
    Mr. Raymond's, not those held by NewsForge editors or OSDN
    management. However, it should be noted that NewsForge
    editors and writers are not being paid or coerced by IBM in
    any way to write (or not write) about SCO's recent actions./

    /2nd Editor's note: If, as Mr. McBride claims, the amount of
    attention SCO has gotten from the computer press is a
    rational measure of the company's relevance, then -- at for
    least this week -- the authors of the sobig.f virus are far
    more relevant than SCO./

Cheers; Leon