LWN: Comments on "SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)"

Too mean?

jschrod — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 01:14:37 +0000

No.

Rob was not only writing pro-SCO articles. He libelled PJ from Groklaw, and spread lies about her. In fact, in this very article he does it again (``intentionally misleading'' etc.) He wrote flames, with hate-filled rabidness, not pro-something articles.

Please note: I don't think that PJ is the unbiased saint that she likes to present herself. But she is surely not intentionally misleading anybody. Her bias is very clear to everybody who can read, and she presents the facts that are the base for her opinions. One can disagree with her, because one draws other conclusions from these facts; but one cannot say that she is dishonest, as Rob Enderle does. (In fact, I disagree with lots what she posts beyond her legal analysis of the SCO story.)

And yet, Rob Enderle was still not able to admit that he was plain wrong. Go back and reread TFA.

No, treatment of Rob Enderle's rubbish is not too mean, it's OK.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

dan_b — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:14:43 +0000

Compare and contrast:

"I use [Wikipedia] as an example of why you can't trust Open
Source at face value and need to actually review the code
yourself before blessing it."

and

"[SCO] showed me what they claimed was copied code. As it turned
out later, the code they showed me was mostly in the public
domain and, as it eventually turned out, anything that was left
was not theirs in the first place."

Sounds like it's not just "Open Source" that requires fact
checking. Lesson 1 for anyone claiming to be an analyst, I'd
have thought.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: Bashing Groklaw

clugstj — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:10:28 +0000

This is not the first time I've seen Groklaw bashing. In every instance, no actual evidence is provided.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

Ross — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:33:10 +0000

Yes, and we're pretty sure it was the same information as they presented "encrypted" at a conference. Nice for us, it seems they thought that switching the font to "symbol" was a secure way to hide the actual code.

There was a lot of discussion about the examples at the time, but from memory they broke into three pieces:

1) standard macro defintions like errno.h and signal.h
SCO doesn't own this (nor does Novell), and it was also obvious that it wasn't an exact copy. Of course Linux uses the same names -- they are in multiple published standards. And Linux uses the same (mostlly) numbers as other x86 Unix-like systems -- it's a defacto standard.

2) the BPF code
SCO doesn't own this (nor does Novell), and in fact the two versions they were comparing weren't the same. Again, it's an exported interface which is a de-facto standard. The original was published under a BSD license. Notably SCO's "original" copy had that license and copyright information removed.

3) a short kernel-space implementation of malloc for SGI's Altix platform
SGI contributed this code, and it did come from Unix, though it had been there since _very_ early days, and those versions are not in copyright. In any case, the kernel developers were not comfortable with it, and the code should have been using the standard allocators anyway so it was ripped out.

All in all is was a tiny amount of code, and it demonstrated SCO's ineptitude (and possibly intentional deception) more than anything else.

The fact that the analysts kept clinging to SCO's claims (which continued to expand) after this debunking is what really raised red flags, at least in my mind. I now instantly notice when an analyst is quoted, which is far too often, and how they never say anything very insightful. In short, I learned to not assume that people reporting the news have done their homework, and to not rule out the possibility that they have an undisclosed relationship with what they are reporting on.

Too mean?

error27 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:13:02 +0000

Yeah, too mean.

Rob was writing pro-SCO articles because he was pissed at the geeks. It's lame but I mostly pity rather than hate him.

Life is too short for the hate.

Feedback loop

dmarti — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:13:04 +0000

There is a feedback loop, though. ("Lyons effect"?) Make a mistake about Linux, and potty-mouth trolls call you mean names. Then you say Linux users are potty-mouth trolls who call people mean names, and more potty-mouth trolls call you more mean names. Pretty soon the only people who are willing to talk to you are potty-mouth trolls, and the only thing they're willing to tell you is that you're some mean name.

Frank apology

man_ls — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 07:38:18 +0000

Hmmm, you are right. You just remembered me how angry it made me :D

It must be that compared to the present looong, incriminatory rant, Lyons' appeared frank and apologetic.

Frank apology

ncm — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:36:09 +0000

Actually, Lyons did not offer a frank apology.

First, he didn't offer an apology. The closest he came was "mea culpa", which means "I made a mistake", or "it was my fault". Without the actual apology, it amounts to, "I was wrong, suck it."

Second, what he did write wasn't frank. It differed from Enderle's screed in being smooth, which enabled him to distract us from the real issue, which is that he's a lazy and incompetent reporter who is frequently wrong for simple, correctable reasons he'd like us not to dwell on.

SCO and the failure of analyst firms

gdt — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:45:05 +0000

Let's say you are a paying punter of these analyst firms: the customer they are meant to be serving. Did you get reasonable advice from any of them concerning the SCO-IBM litigation? Reasonable advice is essential: the contingent liability is a SCOsource license of US$699 per 1 CPU chassis; the liability attached to IBM AIX machines is greater.

My answer is no. Gartner said in June 2003: "Although Gartner has reservations on the merits of [SCO's claims], don't take them lightly" and advised "Minimize Linux in complex, mission-critical systems until the merits of SCO's claims or any resulting judgments become clear". This is arse covering by Gartner, not the insightful advice you are paying for. Gartner's later advice was no more helpful, note the "If you find SCO's case compelling" which moves the effort of information discovery and risks of its evaluation back to the client (again, isn't that what I'm paying you for?):

Don't ignore the problem by hoping IBM will win or settle its lawsuit (that could take a year or more). An IBM win would not prevent SCO from pursuing individual claims, which, if successful, could cost far more in penalties than buying a SCO license would. If you find SCO's case compelling and you use few instances of v.2.4, pay the license fees.

In Oct 2003 George Weiss of Gartner was interviewed, calling Linux shops with no plans to pay SCO not "sufficiently concerned":

Are you familiar with the Credit Suisse First Boston survey, which found that 84% of CIOs have not changed their Linux plans?

I saw that. Well, take that 84%. So that means 16% of CIOs would not cut a check for Linux. I wouldn't be happy with even that number. I mean, that may feel good, but it's still a message that there's a number of CIOs out there that are sufficiently concerned about it, and I've spoken to some.

That a spectacularly poor call. That 84% of CIOs were following what proved to be the optimal strategy, not wasting their time on unfounded litigation.

And so it goes on with essentially the same advice for three years until this September:

Few surprised at SCO plight

As word continues to spread about the SCO Group Inc.'s bankruptcy filing, the reaction among industry analysts is largely the same: Not too many people are surprised.

"I thought eventually things would catch up to them," said George Weiss, an analyst for the information technology research company Gartner Inc.

"It was a strategic mistake to put so much investment in the IBM lawsuit and attack the Linux community," Weiss said.

Those "few" presumably would include customers who followed Gartner's advice.

Now I'm just picking on one well-known firm here. But I could go through all of the major firms and show that they mis-called the result, ignoring early indications that SCO were full of hot air such as SGI's trawl through the Linux kernel and the bizarre SCO Forum 2003 "evidence".

A few boutique firms called it right. How did they do that? In general, they ignored the PR from both sides, considered the actual claims and evaluated them against the code. Those big firm analysts go to too many vendor long lunches and believe too much of what they hear there -- they don't get their hands dirty and are too easily snowed.

Now maybe what the analysts thought privately and what they said publicly differed. That could only be the result of a simple lack of courage. Customers are paying for analysts' best advice. If analysts are not able to provide their best advice they should not take your money nor offer other advice.

Of course, all this assumes that the CIO is the real client of these firms, not vendors paying for reports to use as a sophisticated form of advertising. The analyst firms say that the CIO's interests are dearest to their hearts. The analyst firms' performance in serving the CIO's interests in the most prominent IT litigation in years says otherwise.

Crazy conspiracy of the day

nix — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:11:32 +0000

I think that last option requires too much twisty-mindedness of RMS ;)

Rob Enderle and Treacherous Computing

cdmiller — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:34:13 +0000

Well, I just noticed Rob Enderle is part of the Treacherous Computing advisory council. Notice he is touted as part of a team of "International Security Experts":

https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/press/TCG_Releases/...
https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/about/Advisory_Coun...

Once a shill always a shill?

Clearly the Linux community needs to ...

kmself — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:10:22 +0000

... send threats, flowers, or whatever else is necessary to induce Ms. Quandt to write a "How I didn't get snowed by SCO" article. "See, I told you so" may be juvenile, but damned if it ain't justified and/or immensely satisfying in this case.

ris could pick it up and post it to LWN's women-in-tech dept., futher dropping Jon's subscribership levels ;-)

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

i3839 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:00:06 +0000

Well, I did follow the SCO saga via Growlaw, but still had no clue who he was. I still don't see how he's relevant though, or do people really take him seriously? That'd be scary.

Crazy conspiracy of the day

man_ls — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:56:48 +0000

As Ingo very astutely said above, we cannot even assume that it was anyone having anything to do with Free software that scared our hero; after all it was just a bunch of anonymous internet threats and scare mails, wasn't it? Knowing his childish character, all SCO had to do was to hire someone to engage him in a public forum posing as a fanatic. They could be sure that the poor fool would join the other side out of spite.

For all we know, it could have been Darl McBride himself. Or it could have been Steve Ballmer that convinced McBride to do the trick. Or (in a strange twist) maybe Stallman tricked Ballmer into convincing McBride to pose as a Free software fanatic, knowing that in the end Linux (the kernel) and Free software in general would come out fortified. It is hard to be sure of anything these days, with the internet and all.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

raf — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:45:28 +0000

I saw an Enderle article here on LWN last year and wondered the same thing, so I poked around the web and wrote the Wikipedia article he's now so bitter about (I didn't contribute the "Fiona" factoid though).

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

amikins — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:14:07 +0000

Industry tech writer who has historically taken the side of SCO. There's something like a feud between him and Groklaw. Not terribly relevant if you're not concerned about Groklaw or the IBM/SCO and Novell/SCO lawsuits.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

dkite — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:02:20 +0000

If I was breaking and entering with an intent to steal, and some mean
person shoved the nasty end of a shotgun in my back, I may find that I
don't particularly like them.

These people were conspiring to steal the work of other people. Plain and
simple. Remove all the legal verbiage, Novell drove them into bankruptcy
because they were spending Novell's money on lawyers to cause them harm.
They were conspiring to steal the copyrights of kernel developers for
their own gain. They found a willing stooge with a reputation and ego to
match.

Enderle deserves the reputation he gained. He was a fool, a pompous fool,
and has taken a very long and painful fall.

Derek

SCO and the Three Stooges

nix — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:24:46 +0000

Wow. That *has* to be a troll. I can think of fewer more effective ways of
getting a detonating ESR than to compare him to Marx :)

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

jre — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:15:14 +0000

For me, the one nugget of newness in Rob Enderle's relentlessly self-serving version of history was the revelation of why he came to say the things he did. It seems that the reason he accepted anything SCO said with a childlike faith, and continued to carry their water long after Merriam-Webster had started carrying Darl's photo next to the definition of "liar", was that he was tricked into it ... by people who frightened him. Who knew we had such power?

Hey, Enderle ...

BOO!

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

nim-nim — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:31:38 +0000

Also there such a huge missing part in the article I didn't notice it at first.

Enderle has not a single word in this long piece for his readers. Lots of words about market players, editors, analysts, Linux meanies, his own importance, but about the sheep who believed him? Nothing.

He's not just any journalist. He's supposed to give valuable advice to people. He's not writing for entertainment, or hunting scoops, but advising people. And here we see those people count for nothing in his mind.

He reminds me of the late middle-age knights that cared only about the artificial rules of their tourneys, and had completely forgotten they were supposed to protect people and win actual battles.

SCO and the Three Stooges

josh_stern — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:29:02 +0000

If I were writing that article I would have noted that the timing of both Lyons and Enderle's articles seemed to most closely follow SCO's Chapter 11 filing rather than Novell's courtroom victory or the many legal rulings from Judge Kimball indicating that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux (only charges of IBM's alleged abuse of the Monterey Project really remain to that lawsuit). That timing says a lot to me about both of them and how much they care about truth vs. money flow.

Too mean?

ncm — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:49:36 +0000

Too mean? They are supposed to be professionals. They are paid to get their facts right, and to stitch the facts into coherent stories. They took the money, but didn't bother to get the facts, and they made up stories inconsistent even with the facts they had. None of them has even the least plausible excuse for their extremes of incompetence. All that can be said in their favor is that they didn't lie us into a war, like Judy and company at the New York Times, but there's no reason to think they wouldn't have done, if asked to.

"Especially Didio"? Why does she get a pass?

These people are not just incompetents and liars. Anybody can be that. They made their living at being incompetents and liars. If anything, they experienced much less meanness than they earned: all are still employed, right?

SCO and the Three Stooges

leoc — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:46:14 +0000

Hey Eric, the stooges have apparently been procreating down under:

"Pass the source, please"

There is little doubt the open-source software movement has anti-capitalist elements. It even has a manifesto, the well-known tract The Cathedral and the Bazaar, written by the movement's very own Karl Marx, Eric Raymond (find it at catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar).

Steel Cage Match

leoc — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:17:56 +0000

It certainly has, if you didn't know it is actually called the "WWE" (they lost the WWF name to the world wildlife fund). :)

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

i3839 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:00:19 +0000

Stupid question: Who the hell is Rob Enderle.

Or in other words, please, next time tell in the intro what it is about, or provide a tiny bit of background info. That makes it much easier to judge if the actual link goes to something interesting or not.

And no, "senior research fellow" apparently doesn't mean anything.

I don't blame Enderle

dmarti — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:32:34 +0000

And any reporter or editor who can spell "Google" should be able to find that out, and either attribute anything from him correctly or not use it.

I don't blame Enderle

hppnq — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:16:39 +0000

I really don't blame Enderle for advocating on behalf of his clients. It's what all marketing people do.

You mean insulting large groups of people and not being open about background and motive are common practice in marketing, and therefore to be tolerated? Mmmh.

The man is a clown and a disgrace to his profession.

Microsoft's shill

danielpf — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:16:35 +0000

" Its been ironic that, while Microsoft is one of my clients, the company also is the only client that asked me to not have anything to do with the SCO topic."

It is ironic indeed to admit that Microsoft does dictate to the so
called independent analyst what he is allowed to write.

I don't blame Enderle

dmarti — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:58:56 +0000

I really don't blame Enderle for advocating on behalf of his clients. It's what all marketing people do. The problem is lazy reporters who don't disclose his business relationships with the companies they write about when quoting him, or lazy editors who don't run the "Mr. Enderle is a consultant whose clients include..." blurb on pieces that he writes for them.

If one of your authors or sources has a business relationship with a company covered in the story, always mention it.

More: What the IT Media learned from the SCO mess (or should have)

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

branden — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:54:06 +0000

Regarding excusability, that was an inference I was drawing from Enderle's article.

Whether Enderle should actually *be* excused is an important question only for him, those in his personal life, and those who contribute to his livelihood.

Whether I, or most people in the Free Software community, grant or withhold our sympathy is, I suspect, irrelevant, because he does not appear to be seeking it.

Absolution requires penitence.

I'm not really sure how the community could have handled Mr. Enderle better. He dwells on death threats at great length, which he should if they really happened, but as others have noted, these are serious crimes, and Mr. Enderle has offered little information about his effort to assist the authorities in pursuing them.

If Enderle is concocting these threats as a smokescreen, he does a disservice to those journalists in the Middle East and elsewhere who really do have to deal with such things -- and often in environments where the civil authorities cannot or will not do much about them.

Libel?

Duncan — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:41:15 +0000

Well, legal case to be made or not, the fact is pursuing such a case would
require making public certain details PJ has so far (understandably)
chosen to keep private. I don't see her choice changing. It's not like
anything he can say is going to make a difference anyway. Whatever
reputational damage he might have been able to do (with anyone
that listens to him) is already done, so IMO, PJ might as well just
continue as she is.

Meanwhile... his article didn't seem quite as bad to me as many seem to be
portraying it. There's certainly some faults in it; I don't particularly
like the way he talks about that junior analyst for one thing. He
says he recognizes that he let others manipulate him into taking a
position he otherwise wouldn't have taken, and I see no harm in taking
that at face value. He now recognizes that manipulation, and that it lead
him to take the wrong position, a position a more mature person or one
with different weaknesses wouldn't have taken. That's coming some way and
it looks like he recognizes he's still got a way to go, some maturing to
do.

While I'm not going to be trusting any recommendations he makes right
away, I'm not going to be casting stones, either. Quoting the (now
disbanded) "Up with People" theme song, "If more people people were for
people, all people everywhere, there'd be a lot less people to worry
about, and a lot more people who care." He's "people" and certainly not
faultless (the junior analyst thing remains one here), but he's "people",
and as such, he's allowed mistakes, even ones as bad as this, and
as "people", he deserves a chance to mature and to change his ways.
Others do what they will, I choose to give it to him.

Duncan

It wouldn't be surprising.

felixfix — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:37:47 +0000

Both Lyons and Enderle suffer(ed) from the same problem: their knowledge of the FLOSS community is pitifully weak. Their only knowledge of the IT industry is the big shots. Their fondness for the movers and shakers has blinded them.

When SCO first announced Linux had stolen code, it was obvious to most of us that they were bare faced liars. It should have been a clue to these pundits when SCO refused to show the millions of lines of code, and when SCO did show a few samples and were exposed as liars for the rest of the world to see, these pundits still had no clue.

Why these clowns were blind is obvious: they were shills for the industry big shots. I don't mean in the direct pay of Microsoft, but they were beholden to the big shots for their scoops and "insight" and had long since lost any ability to think independently or dig for news on their own. Compare them to Cringely, who is not always right, but at least has half a brain and is not afraid to use it to speculate intelligently.

These pundits should be put out to pasture. They have passed the point of having any utility.

Stacey Quandt (the "near entry level" analyst) and the NDA

mattdm — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:20:16 +0000

I suspect that if LWN were to track down this "near entry level" analyst (and it took me five minutes of Googling to figure whom that is likely to be) we would find that she would not sign the NDA since it would restrict the analyst firm's ability to give advice to its customers.

Presuming it was indeed Stacey Quandt (and that seems to be very likely), she's already said this, as quoted in this ComputerWorld article:

But Giga Information Group Inc. analyst Stacey Quandt said she has discussed SCO's offer with her legal counsel, and if she signs an NDA, it may hinder her ability to write about it. She could get subpoenaed as well. Quandt called the offer a PR stunt.

And if you think about that for a moment, it goes a step further -- presumably, the "legal counsel" she mentions was Giga Information Group's own lawyers, which Enderle then apparently decided to ignore. Total speculation: she told the company lawyers what he said, and they also cautioned him. Or, as Enderle says in the article: "[she] then did everything in her power to keep me from meeting with them". Well, Rob, she tried to save you, but some thanks she gets.

It wouldn't be surprising.

man_ls — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:05:29 +0000

Indeed. The dork confesses that he is easy to manipulate; trying to blame others for his shortcomings is really pathetic.

At least Lyons had the decency of offering a frank apology.

Why the hell I posted a link to that trash

TxtEdMacs — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:04:10 +0000

Read a bit of the Wikipedia piece, I think your assessment is correct. This guy out does Enderle, moreover unlike the aforementioned, he might possess some technical competence.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

swiftone — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:52:46 +0000

Mr. Enderle frankly admit that he lost his objectivity, and doesn't regret having done so. People were mean to him, so it was excusable

As a person? Yes. Though the lack of regret seriously tempers any sympathy.

As a journalist who is paid for (theoretical) objectivity? No. Not to excuse the threats he may have received, but if he reacts to flames with bias and taunts, he's in the wrong industry. Those that trolled him provided as much unbiased and factually based information as he was (and by this essay, is) providing others.

That he uses this non-mea-culpa to lash out at others that don't deserve it (the "analyst" that "didn't have the writing skills" and apparently "did all she could" to avoid meeting with SCO, NDA not mentioned) without taking personal responsibility for not performing fact checking only cements the impression.

In a better world, such an unrepentant lack of objectivity would be a serious impediment to the career of a journalist or analyst.

Better worlds don't happen on their own.

Why the hell I posted a link to that trash

mattdm — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:50:59 +0000

For whatever it's worth, you were thinking of Jeff Merkey, who, to put it nicely, is quite a character — the Linux offer being only one example.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

branden — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:30:26 +0000

In my opinion, too many comments here dwell on Enderle's assessment of his own importance. I think this misses the mark.

Clearing away the rhetoric, in this piece you can see Mr. Enderle frankly admit that he lost his objectivity, and doesn't regret having done so. People were mean to him, so it was excusable.

In a better world, such an unrepentant lack of objectivity would be a serious impediment to the career of a journalist or analyst.

Fortunately for Mr. Enderle, big technology corporations are unlikely to run out openings in public relations before he runs out of days until retirement.

SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle: A Conclusion (TG Daily)

timschmidt — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:18:37 +0000

> So everybody agrees, that Rob Enderle is just covering his ass instead of
> stripping fully naked in order to apologize in front of people who
> threatened to kill him?

Right.

> I think his piece is not entirely well written, but this sounds like a
> human being who is torn in between ethical principles and personal
> involvement. He did not manage to free himself back then and he is
> obviously still no able to look on the story in an unbiased manner. But at
> least he is able to think about this fact and explains his personal
> problems with situations as this.

You're making the rather large assumption that what he writes and what he thinks / feels are at least somewhat related.

> I came to see that it is extremely difficult to stand up and state that the
> people who treat you nice are assholes and that the people who treat you
> like an asshole are actually nice. It takes a very clear sight and a big
> deal of detachment. Most people do not even get to see the gap. Let alone
> let go of their friends.

It's not difficult if you're lying. (and, ostensibly, lying comes as easily to you as it seems to come to Rob)

> So if you are able to state, that you have always upheld truth and morale
> against your friends and in favor of people who hated you. Then you are
> free to cast the first stone. Otherwise, I think you should not judge Rob
> Enderle.

Judge him? No.

Exact redress for the measurable harm Mr. Enderle has done each and every person invested in anything linux-related? Sure.

Ensure that evaluations of Mr. Enderle's accuracy as an industry analyst accurately reflect his years of gross misjudgement? You bet.

Ridicule him and call him silly names? It's called socialization. :)

Why the hell I posted a link to that trash

TxtEdMacs — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:09:17 +0000

I must admit I too had the same initial, visceral response wondering why bother giving this guy a forum, however, on just a bit of reflection it switched to: "why not?".

My interest was very limited, since I ceased reading his "response" almost immediately when it became clear it was no more than self justification.

My interest in Enderle, may have been based upon a mistaken impression that he once made offer to buy a version of Linux free of GPL for $50,000 USD. My memory, too had this person assert the purchase offer was both legitimate and reasonable to obtain an unencumbered copy of Linux. I had hoped to read how anyone could have so little comprehension to not realize the transaction was virtually impossible and the price offered was a pittance. Or better, an admission the whole offer was a cover for some other thrust. I concluded a truthful explanation was unlikely, hence, I stopped reading.

I wish to point out, that those with greater reading skills than I brought forth some interesting material about his justifications and his basic insecurities particularly regarding women. Moreover, his very corporate mentality (at its worst) told a lot about his underlying person. Thus, I thank those that read the piece in its entirety and shared their insights.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read it myself.