The FSF/GNU Project has served (and continues to serve) the role of the Irish during the dark ages. That is – FSF/GNU preserved an ideal of software civilization that was all but wiped out by perverse greed (not commercialism, but rather its evil twin). For several years, I could find no compilers nearly as good as the ones from GNU.

FSF/GNU has contributed more usable and valuable software to the ‘public domain’ than one would have thought possible. I often disagree with Mr. Stallman, especially in his belief that all software must be free. Such an approach clearly seems to leave some ‘gaps’. In fact, I prefer the BSD license to the GPL for practical reasons. Having said this, I must also assert that Mr. Stallman, et al. retain one of the few consistent and principled stances in the current Un*x intellectual property mess.

Intellectual property (IP) could not have a worse representative than the SCO Group to promote its cause. Someone recently compared SCO defending IP to Larry Flynt defending free speech. Actually, of the two SCO Group is far worse. The company was formed as Caldera and had AS ITS PRIMARY MISSION to promote, advance and make available distributions of Linux. For the company to then purchase -some- of the Un*x IP rights (they don’t own the name “UNIX” for example) and turn on the industry they helped promote is the cheapest form of opportunism. Please note that opportunism is not the same as commercialism. The former is usually very short-term and entirely self serving; the latter must take into account the quid-pro-quo between buyer and seller over a long time horizon.

- Grover Righter (grover_righter at yahoo dot com)