So what's the next step for you?
We would like very much to see the court system provide the facts as soon as possible. We just want to know the truth. Let the facts be put on the table so they can be dealt with honestly. That's the goal. We want to see this resolved as fast as possible.
You haven't been invited to see the allegedly offending code?
The invitation that I think anybody was offered under an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) has been extended.
But you haven't taken them up on it?
At this point, no.
What would cause you to accept the invitation?
I don't know what that would resolve. Signing an NDA and not being able to deal with the facts once they are presented does not really answer the question of the issues of the suggested violation of intellectual property and trade secrets. More importantly, for customers it doesn't bring a resolution as fast as we would like this to happen.
Has this suit brought to light latent issues that inevitably would have to be dealt with by the open-source community?
I'm sure you could speculate about that. With a paradigm shift in the economics of an entire industry, there will always be those who question, those whose livelihoods and franchises are now being put at risk as a result of this activity. They will try to find a variety of means to challenge our ability to deliver this opportunity to bring technology at the lowest possible cost to the consumer.
Is indemnification something the Linux community needs to consider? It seems that SCO is giving indications that end users are going to be the next target.
That's true and it is what they have stated publicly. But what does indemnification mean and to whom? I think it's the very nature of the transparency of the code base that has allowed software developers to make the claims they can. I think therein lay the uniqueness of the riddle because in a proprietary software environment, if you can't see the code how do you know?
Indemnification is an issue that Red Hat will have to look at very carefully. It's now becoming an issue between our customers and us. We'll have to look at it responsibly and deal with it and think about what that means to our customers.
