Both Raymond and Perens were named in McBride’s letter, in which he criticized the open source development and business models, and challenged the community to change its ways. The pair drafted and published their own open letter in response.

Raymond, the author of The Cathedral & The Bazaar open source philosophy and the president of the Open Source Initiative, was criticized by McBride for not disclosing the identity of the potential perpetrator of a recent denial of service attack against Lindon, Utah-based SCO’s web site.

Mr Raymond made very clear when volunteering his information and calling for the attack to cease that he was contacted by a third-party associate of the perpetrator and does not have the perpetrator’s identity to reveal, wrote Raymond and Perens. The DDoS attack ceased, and has not resumed. Mr Raymond subsequently received emailed thanks for his action from Blake Stowell of SCO.

Your implication that the attacks are a continuing threat, and that the president of the Open Source Initiative is continuing to shield their perpetrator, is therefore not merely both false and slanderous, but contradictory with SCO’s own previous behavior. In all three respects it is what we in the open-source community have come to expect from SCO.

Meanwhile, Perens, author of the Open Source Definition, was claimed by McBride – using a misquoted reference to a ComputerWire article – to have admitted that SCO Unix System V code was now in Linux. SCO’s beef with the open source community stems from its $3bn lawsuit against IBM Corp and claims that Unix code has been copied into Linux.

Those claims have now expanded into challenging the validity of the open source General Public License, and suggestions from SCO that the open source community has no or little respect for intellectual property laws.

Raymond and Perens disputed this claim. As software developers, intellectual property is our stock in trade. Whether we elect to trade our effort for money or rewards of a subtler and more enduring nature, we are instinctively respectful of concerns about IP, credit, and provenance, they wrote. Our licenses (the GPL and others) work with copyright law, not against it. We reject your attempt to portray our community as a howling wilderness of IP thieves as a baseless and destructive smear.

At the end of his open letter, McBride appeared to hold out an olive branch to the open source community by offering to negotiate if they demonstrated respect for intellectual property. Despite maintaining their respect for IP, Raymond and Perens declined the offer, however.

Your offer to negotiate with us comes at the end of a farrago of falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, slanders, and misrepresentations. You must do better than this. We will not attempt to erect a compromise with you on a foundation of dishonesty, they wrote.

Raymond and Perens continued to throw doubt on SCO’s claims that it has identified over a million lines of Unix code in Linux, which they described as mathematically impossible given the known, publicly accessible history of Linux development.

We of the open-source community do not concede that there is anything to negotiate. Linux is our work and our lawful property, they continued. If you wish to make a respectable case for contamination, show us the code. Disclose the overlaps. Specify file by file and line by line which code you believe to be infringing, and on what grounds. We will swiftly meet our responsibilities under law, either removing the allegedly infringing code or establishing that it entered Linux by routes which foreclose proprietary claims.

Members of the open source community have repeatedly asked SCO to specify which code it believes has been copied from Unix into Linux, so that they can assess it and remove it if necessary. SCO has categorically refused to do so however, maintaining that it has to protect its code by keeping details of it secret.

A remedy for this Catch-22 situation was suggested in August when Raymond challenged SCO to specify the code it believes to be infringing by line and file number so that the Linux community could begin to remedy any breaches without SCO having to publicly publish the code. SCO has yet to respond to this offer.

Source: ComputerWire