December 9, 2003

Linus Torvalds replies to Darl McBride of SCO

on December 4th, Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) published a letter. We wrote about it here Today, Linus Torvalds published an excellent rebuttal here bq. GPL is no hippie dream Last Thursday, The SCO Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Darl McBride posted an open letter on SCO's Web site arguing that Linux backers were threatening to undermine the copyright protections provided in U.S. and European law. McBride's posting was the latest in a series of public statements by SCO portraying the open-source operating system as a threat to the commercial software industry and an enemy of intellectual property. "There is a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress," McBride wrote. bq. In this column, Linux creator Linus Torvalds rebuts Mr. McBride's arguments, arguing that the GPL (GNU General Public License) software license that governs Linux has far more in common with U.S. Copyright Law than McBride suggests. Posted by DaveH at December 9, 2003 9:59 AM