Torvalds, Linux users unfazed by SCO suits

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Better rhetoric - GPL is Freedom, as in "The Land of the Free"

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733
QUOTE
So instead I want to talk about the legal future of free software as it actually is, rather than as Mr. McBride sees it, some titanic clash between the American way of life and whatever it is we?re supposed to be. I should say about that titanic clash between the American way of life and whoever we are that it rings familiar to me. Increasingly I listen to Mr. McBride and I hear Mr. Ballmer, as perhaps you do as well. That is to say, I treat SCO now as press agentry for the Microsoft monopoly, which has deeper pockets and a longer-term concern with what we are doing.

[39:38]

Microsoft?s a very wealthy corporation, and it could succeed on a business model of software-as-a-public utility surrounded by services in the 21st century. But for all the profound depth of Mr. Gates? mind, the idea of human freedom is one of those things which doesn?t register very well with him. And the idea of transforming his business into a service business, for reasons that are, I think, accessible to us all, doesn?t appeal. Therefore, for the survival of the Microsoft monopoly, and I do actually mean its survival, the theory being presented by Mr. McBride that we are doing something horrid to the American way of life must prevail. Regrettably for Microsoft, it won?t, because what we are actually doing is more apparent to the world than that propagandistic view will allow for. We at any rate have to go on about our business, which is encouraging the freedom of knowledge and in particular the freedom of technical knowledge, and in doing that, we have to confront the actual challenges presented to us by the world in which we live (which aren?t SCO), and so for just a few more moments I want to talk about those.

Software is, in our phrase, free, libre. That is to say, we now have a body of software accessible to everybody on earth so robust and so profound in its possibilities that we are a few man months away from doing whatever it is that anybody wants to do with computers all the time. And of course new things are constantly coming up that people would like to do and they are doing them. In this respect -- I say this with enormous satisfaction -- in this respect the Free Software Movement has taken hold and is now ineradicably part of the 21st century. But there are challenges to the freedom of free software which we need to deal with.
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Posted by: David Mohring   Posted on: 03/04/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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