Poker Man

So now SCO have sued two companies, and have four others who have paid licence fees. The two unfortunate ones are AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. Bank of America was also a target for a brief period.

And in a memo leaked to Eric Raymond, we now discover what we suspected all along: namely that Bill Gates has been financing this harassment. Up to now, the Redmond criminals have poured $86 million into the desperate campaign being waged in a Utah ghost town.

Simultaneously the stakes have been raised: SCO now want $5 billion in damages from IBM.

No one cares about the outcome. To the open source community, the outcome is certain: they will prevail. The only thing bothering them is that the process is taking so long.

But of course it's taking a long time: legal stuff always does, and in this particular case, to re-quote John Steinbeck, it's not the joy of arriving at one's destination, it's the pleasure of traveling there.

The objective is clear: Bill Gates wants to destroy open source. SCO have now attacked the person of Linus Torvalds directly, accusing him of personally stealing their code. All the papers referred to Bill Gates - the so-called Halloween Documents - clearly outline the threat that open source presents to Microsoft and the means of overcoming it by, amongst other things, fudding the open source movement in general and slandering the person of Linus Torvalds in particular.

No one wants results from the legal system. The open source movement might, but they'd prefer the whole thing to go away. And Bill Gates does not want results from the legal system either: he might lose, as he lost in the DOJ trial in Washington. No, the purpose of this circus stunt is not to get to the courtroom, but to keep upping the stakes until the other players, at first assured they had the better poker hands, begin to falter and ultimately fold and concede defeat.

That is what Bill Gates is aiming for, that is what he has always been aiming for, and as things stand now, he's very close to attaining it.