SCO, the shit-ass company that decided they can’t compete in the marketplace so they will compete in the courtroom, is now turning their attention to the Feds. This is not so noteworthy but provides a nice opportunity for me to bash them. Here is a quote from the above:

“Free or low-cost open-source software, full of proprietary code, is grabbing an increasing portion of the software market. Each open-source installation displaces or pre-empts a sale of proprietary, licensable and copyright-protected software,” McBride said in a letter, republished by the Open Source and Industry Alliance. “This means fewer jobs, less software revenue and reduced incentives for software companies to innovate.”

This is the scary part about this SCO bullshit. Almost everyone agrees that SCO does not have much of a case. The problem is, we have a government, controlled by the Republicans, which always sides with industry. The above argument from McBride will resonate with the trickle-down good ol’ boy capitalists. Now clearly you cannot even wage, not to mention win, a war against Open Source. The government cannot take action against the willful cooperation of developers to contribute to Open Source. They can, however, back ill-conceived efforts like that of SCO. I wouldn’t put it past them. The problem is, the Open Source movement now has the vehement support of IBM, Novell, Apple, Sun, Google, Amazon, etc. If you are on the side of industry you can’t draw a clean line here — it turns out Open Source is good for industry, it creates great software, it adds a ton of value and in many ways it is driving our economy. For example, the Apache web server software is a big win for a lot of companies. It is bundled with a lot of operating systems and applications. Many companies dedicate paid programmers to Open Source.

So, as usual, McBride is wrong. His motivation is lining his own pockets and should not be interpreted as any valid economic argument against Open Source. McBride is a loser who makes his living litigating instead of competing and that is anti-marketplace. SCO is going to die and they should die and McBride should take his anti-competitive bullshit off the table.