Jimmy's weblog

The Economist magazine is running an article on the series of SCO versus IBM / Red Hat / Linux court battles. It’s rather brief, but I do like the description of “buttoned-down types clinging to proprietary and closed computer systems”. Fairly appropriate in more ways than one - SCO CEO Darl McBride is a devout Mormon. Apparently Greed isn’t mentioned in their ten commandments.

SCO, for anyone who has never heard of the company, is pronounced “skoh”, as in Scopes. Indeed “the SCO case” of 2003 sounds increasingly like the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted religious fundamentalists against progressives wanting to teach Darwin alongside the Bible in American classrooms. The SCO case plays the same role in a culture war now consuming the software industry. On one side are the equivalents of the fundamentalists—buttoned-down types clinging to proprietary and closed computer systems. Facing them are today’s evolutionists—the pony-tailed set championing collaboration and openness in the form of Linux, an operating system that anybody can download and customise for nothing. The 1925 trial had a monkey as its symbol; the 2003 case has the Linux trademark, a cute penguin.

More at http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2020889 (free now, but will probably be archived for pay - try searching Google for cached version).