Linux lab hires lawyers for Torvalds

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re: Only in the US

This appears to be an aspect of a major flaw in American culture: We think of ourselves as independent of or disconnected from the notions of Feudalism and the associated notions that certain lineages are vested with a "nobility" that grants them special dispensations. But at the same time we feel it is our right to behave with impunity regardless of how our actions affect other individuals or other nations. We have a tendency to behave as if any dispute that arises as a result of these actions or the objections of others to them should be resolved not by interaction with those who take exception to our deeds and attitudes to work out some satisfactory plan of recourse, but by referring then some authority that is above the level of the parties involved in the conflict. And we want to take no personal responsibility unless it is decreed from "on high". Then usually the decision is protested or thought of as unfair or even un-American as if bad behavior was a right that others should not even attempt to object to, much less interfere with. SCO is claiming that they have been wronged by IBM, then attempting to say that furthermore IBM is making things difficult by not providing them with evidence of the violations SCO is accusing them of even after IBM has repeatedly asked for some indication as what they are alleging. Smug, self-centered and shockingly self-confident in the face of their lack of specific allegations and constant reversals of declared principle and strategy (we are going to sue end users of Linux, no, we never had any plan to actually sue, we simply offered a run-time license so we could be compensated "fairly" for our Intellectual Property that end users were deceived into using by IBM who has violated our contract by incorporating these examples of code into Linux, well actually, the public domain code and BSD and GPL-licensed code that we have been showing to our resellers and investors and market analysts aren't actually what IBM did, even though we have clearly labeled it as such, they are only examples of how this could be done and we are waiting for IBM to tell us exactly what it was they did so that we can continue to move forward aggressively in the discovery process by doing such things as sending them a million pages of scanned copies of printouts of source code because they asked us for machine readable copies of code so they could look for examples of potential infringement and a scanner is a machine, isn't it, and these pages are proof that a machine can read the printouts of code ...). I am ashamed to say that they are behaving exactly as Americans are developing a reputation for doing (even though it is far from a universal characteristic.) If the court system wasn't already so bogged down resolving disputes that we as a group are too pig-headed to work out on our own, I feel that they would have already been rebuked and dismissed as childish and insincere opportunists. I can only hope that the IBM legal team can successfully argue for dismissal with prejudice on December 5th and proceed with their countersuit to smash these would-be parasites and strip them of the wealth they have obtained through their abuse of the press and the legal system.

Posted by: Still Lynn   Posted on: 11/14/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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