mec's Journal: Channeling Your SCO Rage

So, SCO's out to destroy things that I love and that I've spent years of work on, paid and unpaid. Microsoft and Sun are funding the SCO legal/PR attack. I'm outraged. And if you're reading this, you probably feel the same way.

What to do?

(1) Work on an open source project. If you're a programmer, you already know how you can help. If you can write doco, review the documentation and send documentation patches. If you can translate documentation into another language, ask around for projects that need help in the language that you write in. If you can help test CVS versions, do that. If you know how to write a good bug report, do that.

(2) Do background research. Any bit of fact might be useful to IBM's lawyers or LinuxTag's lawyers or Red Hat's lawyers. More importantly, these facts might be useful to the trade press, who work on a much smaller budget than IBM's legal budget!

Start by reading groklaw and get a feel for what's useful. Then hit the search engines and look for things. When you are presenting research, keep your opinion percentage low, and your facts and references high.

(3) Move to Utah and register to vote in time for jury selection for the trial in 2005. IBM is paying relocation expenses; talk to your IBM co-ordinator for details.

(4) If you need an outlet, use Slashdot for the outlet, and use other communication channels for real news and information that might actually help protect our work.

(5) If someone contacts you and claims to be, or be speaking for, a member of the Linux community who is committing illegal acts against SCO: respond to the second part of that message, not the first. Either hang up and keep your mouth shut, or turn the message over to the proper law enforcement agencies.

That's it, really. "Do something positive for an open source project" takes just a few words to way, but can take lots and lots of time to execute.