January 19th, 2007
Are open source obsessions healthy or useful?
Since I began blogging about open source here at ZDNet I have learned there are two words I can use that guarantee traffic and controversy.
Readers are obsessed with the threats these two companies pose to open source. The two threats really boil down to one idea, that lawyers may be able to kill open source in court through claims of "intellectual property" rights. (This obsession tree lives at the UCLA offices of former Prof. Casey Reas.)
The SCO case has been Schaivo-esque for some time. Its result seems a foregone conclusion. The Microsoft obsession was re-fueled by CEO Steve Ballmer's idiotic comments of last fall, but there is also a basic distrust concerning Microsoft's moves around open source.
My point for this weekend is that, perhaps, it is time to put these obsessions aside. SCO is not going to emerge from the corporate dead. Microsoft is going to learn it must live with open source, because its customers demand that it do so.
There are better things to obsess over, frankly. We can obsess over mobile Linux, about content rights in Linux, about the growing foreign domination of Linux, about Linux innovation, even about Linux' protection of its own trademark, and what that trademark means.
But when I write about these subjects, I don't see the traffic, or the feedback, I see when I mention one of those two magic words, SCO and Microsoft.
Personally I don't think this is healthy or useful. What do you think?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
