SCO's March of Folly

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

May 17, 2003

One of my favorite books is Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. It talks about how those that have governed and/or ruled often pursue policies that, in the end, produce outcomes that are against their own best interests. Mrs. Tuchman's specialty as an historian was writing about how events get out of hand, usually due to a combination of opportunism, incompetence and ignorance. John F. Kennedy supposedly read her most famous book, The Guns of August, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Luckily for all of us, JFK got the point that Tuchman was trying to make . I suggest that Darl McBride and the leadership at SCO pick up these books and read them as well.

Actually, to use this kind of historical reference to describe SCO's aims is to give that company more importance that it really deserves. In the press release announcing their decision to stop distributing Linux, they claim that they expect 4 million US dollars net income on 21 million in revenue. A Chevrolet dealership in a small US city might expect that, so to put it in perspective, the SCO vs IBM lawsuit is no clash of the Titans, at least where SCO is concerned. However, like Tuchman, I'm curious to know why organizations like SCO make these mistakes. And a mistake this is, there's no doubt about it. I mean, if SCO has some sort of end goal, I wish somebody would tell me what it is. The whole case seems more like a comedy of errors than a well thought-out plan that's supposed to lead somewhere.

First, in early March, SCO announced that they are suing IBM for 1 billion (US) dollars. As the owners of the one true Unix, as they claim, they felt the obligation to announce to the world that Big Blue was allegedly putting Unix code, illegally, into the Linux kernel. They assured us that they were not going after the Linux community at large, or so McBride claimed at that time. That would appear logical. SCO, lest we forget, was bought by Linux distribution maker Caldera. SCO/Caldera was also a founding partner of United Linux along with SuSE, Conectiva and TurboLinux. Curiously, SuSE, the flagship of the United Linux fleet, seemed to have been caught off guard by the whole thing. Their CEO talked about the SCO suit as if he had read about it in the newspapers. That's some way to treat your business partner!

At that time, there was no shortage of speculation among Linux pundits as to why SCO may have done this. The conventional wisdom says that SCO, whose stock was trading in early March at under $0.80 US per share, was looking to be bought out or to be handed a large pile of cash by IBM in exchange for going back to whatever it is that SCO does best. Owing to the fact that a large collective yawn was essentially IBM's response and what SCO does best nowadays is generating court papers not source code, offers did not come pouring in either to be bought out or to be bought off.

April passed and the SCO case looked as if it was going to be relegated to anecdotal status within the overall history of Linux. By the first of May, SCO must have realized that we had forgotten about them, so they let us know they were still around. McBride claimed he's had the stolen code and there was the expected "show us" request to which the SCO CEO responded: "The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go.". For those who may not know how kernel development takes place, each version is placed on mirrors throughout the globe and all older versions are kept for historical record and for backward compatibility purposes. The mere fact that millions of copies of the many versions of the Linux kernel have been downloaded would make "laundering" stolen code impossible. McBride's statement must have produced more than a few chuckles at both the kernel mailing lists and IBM's law firm.

This week, SCO decided to bet it all on one roll of the dice. The company stops Linux development and sends letters to major companies that use Linux. They claim in the letter that the the Linux kernel development model doesn't insure protection for intellectual property and "does not prevent inclusion of code that has been stolen outright, or developed by improper use of proprietary methods and concepts.". Again, that's a peculiar stance from a company that, up to the day that they sent out that letter, had been making money from distributing Linux. It, of course, makes one think why they weren't concerned about it before.

The ad hoc way the SCO case is playing out reminds me of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indy, determined to go after the truck with the treasure, sets out on a horse. Just before he rides away, his leading lady asks him: "Indy, what are you going to do now?", and he replies: "I dunno. I'm making this up as I go along."

Back to my original thoughts about folly. Why would this classify? Well, if SCO was making money from their operations, as they claim in their press release, then why do they decide to put that in jeopardy? If they had sat back and thought about it before they announced their suit, they would have realized IBM's reaction was going to be what it was - namely, "see you in court". Here, IBM has got it all over SCO so IBM wasn't about to settle with them either. SCO must have obviously had plans to be bought out, but when offers didn't come in, their only option left was taking on IBM in court, a very a risky thing. So how do you build the case? In most notorious cases, the sides try to get public opinion in their favor. It seems that SCO feels that the best way to do this is to attack Linux in general. But this is very risky as well. To attack Linux is to attack a great social movement. This also means attacking thousands of projects based on Linux which do a great deal of good for people, particularly the underprivileged. I wonder if Mr. McBride sent his letter to the people working on the human genome project which, incidentally, uses Linux clusters. Should we infer from that letter that we need to pause our fight against genetic diseases so SCO can sort out their intellectual property problems? Multiply that dilemma by a thousand and you will see why SCO has aroused so much anger.

Personally though, instead of feeling anger toward the people who run SCO, I feel a little sorry for them. If you analyze the situation, they must know that they're digging themselves deeper and deeper in to a hole. Let's assume they go to court - they will probably lose. They can no longer do any kind of Linux work and their reputation would be so badly damaged that their Unix business would likely never prosper (who would want to do business with people who treat their partners so shabbily). I think a lot of people are asking themselves the same question: Why have they embarked on a course whose outcome is not going to be favorable to anyone? Barbara Tuchman asked the same questions when she wrote her outstanding books. The answer is one of those unexplainable characteristics of human beings: folly.

Michael J. Jordan can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**linux.org (if you replace **AT** with @ - we don't want to encourage spammers now, do we!)