Red Hat founder sees irony in SCO lawsuit

Though the company he founded has been drawn into a legal dispute between The SCO Group Inc. and IBM Corp., former Red Hat Inc. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bob Young has not had much to say about the SCO dispute. At least, that was the case until Wednesday, when Young published an open letter to SCO CEO Darl McBride criticizing him for his management of SCO and countering McBride's recent claims that the open source community is attacking intellectual property laws in Europe and the U.S.

Young, who serves as a Red Hat board member and is no longer involved in the company's day-to-day operations, believes that McBride's recent statements amount to an attack on Young's new business, an on-line custom publishing venture called Lulu Inc., that Young founded in the spring of 2002.

SCO sued IBM in March of this year, claiming that IBM had illegally contributed source code to the Linux operating system. in August, Red Hat jumped into the action, suing SCO for a variety of allegations relating to its Linux claims, including trade libel and deceptive practices.

This edited interview with Young was conducted by telephone, after his open letter was published on Wednesday.

IDG News Service: What prompted you to write this open letter to Darl McBride? To date, you haven't really said much about this SCO-IBM lawsuit.

Bob Young: I'd been going out of my way not to say anything, because McBride was really going after Red Hat. If this latest Open letter had actually been about Red Hat... I would not have said anything because I do not want to confuse (Red Hat CEO) Matthew Szulik's messaging.

But this letter was actually an attack on alternative forms of copyright, and that's what worried me. If McBride and all the fellow travelers -- the Recording Industry Association of America, and the various publishing industry associations -- if they are successful convincing our legislators that anything but the official copyright legislation that has been passed through the U.S. Congress is somehow un-American and should be legislated against, that would do serious damage to the authors who are trying to bring their works to market through Lulu. As far as I'm concerned, McBride's latest open letter was an attack on the authors who I'm trying to empower.

IDGNS: Why do you see Darl McBride's statements as an attack to Lulu's users?

Young: Because of his attack on the GPL (GNU General Public License). If you think about it, his attack on the GPL was a very broad one. He was saying that the GPL was unconstitutional, and the clear implication was anything but the standard copyright terms that are compatible with legislation in the U.S. Congress is somehow unacceptable. That was the clear implication of what he was saying. The GPL is un-American and evil. The follow-up letter from Darl should be a call for legislation to stamp out evil things like the GPL.

What drives me nuts about arguments like Darl's is how self-serving they are and how, if our legislators pay attention to them, they will cause our legislators to write bad legislation.

IDGNS: So what do you think is actually happening with SCO? Their claims involve a variety of intellectual property including copyright, derivative works and trade secrets. Do you think they are essentially trying to control the very idea of Unix?