Interview: Linux usage raises big legal concerns (Gulf News)
Posted Sep 15, 2003 8:01 UTC (Mon) by
hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to:
Interview: Linux usage raises big legal concerns (Gulf News) by rev
Parent article:
Interview: Linux usage raises big legal concerns (Gulf News)
I would like us to develop a communications plan. There must be amongst us
people with experience in PR...
How do we effectively counter the SCO FUD?
Maybe we should focus on a limited set of important absurdities in SCO claims and
debunk these in several easy consumables? ...
Interesting idea, but you've got the wrong suggestions. The SCO claims are absurd
and over time they contradict themselves. Why? They are not trying to win an
argument, they are just trying to stir up as much confusion and get as much press
coverage as possible. Therefore trying to meet them with counterarguments only
makes things worse: it ends up generating even more confusing press coverage.
The right solution then? Realize the fact that the press only has one thing on their mind
at any given time. The best thing to do would be to ignore SCO completely, and
generate other Linux news, completely unrelated to SCO, on a weekly basis. These
news
would have to be so exciting, that it makes the press just forget about SCO.
This being said, it is worth to quietly try to educate the press on SCO. But this should
not take the form of arguments, simple executive summaries are the best. Linus saying
"SCO is full of it and Linux has probably the most sound and transparent IP
foundation in the world" is all that is needed.
In non-US countries, a local Linux company that is known to the media can simply say
something like "an American company called SCO, whom most of us have never
heard of BTW, is making some crazy statements about Linux. Please ignore them and
continue as usual". This is basically the argument of SOT in Finland (backed up by
effi.org) and it works great, because they have way more credibility than SCO in the
eyes of the press.
henrik
(
Log in to post comments)
