when dealing with an extortionist

[Robert Findlay]

It seems that the Open Source community has indicated its willingness to
make a deal with the SCO extortionists.    

http://linuxtoday.com/developer/2003081901726OSCYLL

In my opinion this is a very dangerous tactic but I recognize that the
court system may be many things but fair isn't one of them.

In my opinion if we are going to cut a deal with SCO as an Open Source
community it should contain some elements which ensure that they will never
be a problem again:

	a) SCO must cease to be a Linux distributor permanently
	b) SCO must agree to never bundle any Open Source code with its core SCO
product going forward
	c) SCO must agree to never use any Open Source tools in its development chain
	
In return the Linux community should remove the contentious pieces of
source code from the 2.6 source tree ( presumably until the matter of
ownership is clarified by a court ).

Meanwhile as an Open Source community we should crank it up a notch and
continue to innovate like crazy and lose the closed source companies in our
dust.   We should pool the millions of dollars that would have been spent
on legal costs and set up a foundation to helping independent Open Source
projects help their developers eat.

The reality of this whole debate is that those elements of the Linux kernel
that are at the centre of the dispute are the big enterprise features on
Intel boxes.   Those are the elements on which the big two (IBM and HP) are
sucking all the available profits at the moment.    The bulk of the rest of
the Open Source community is working on aspects (and trying to eek out a
living ) of the Open Source pool that is ultimately going to consume all
the competition in areas such as:

	i) programming tools
	ii) embedded development
	iii) web services
	iv) desktop
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