SCO Group chief executive Darl McBride has attempted to nudge the Homeland Security Advisory alert back up towards Red, by accusing foreign interests of undermining US national security in a draft letter to Congressmen.

How are they doing this?

"Instead of UNIX from any number of US companies or Windows from Microsoft, governments throughout Europe and Asia are using Linux… I find this particularly galling because that Linux software contains thousands of lines of my company's proprietary UNIX code - for which we receive no revenue."

Novell, from whom The SCO Group, in a previous incarnation, licensed this UNIX code, contends that SCO has no ownership rights. Challenged to prove the accusation, SCO has failed to indicate the lines of code that has been 'stolen'.

Giant penguins have captured McBride, and marched him into hostile foreign environments against his will, he writes:

"SCO has a strong, involuntary presence in certain non-US government markets - but this is only through unauthorized use of occur code in Linux software."

"Open Source software - available widely through the Internet - has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by US law. A computer expert in North Korea who has a number of personal computers and an Internet connection can download the latest version of Linux, complete with multi-processing capabilities misappropriated from UNIX, and, in short order, build a virtual supercomputer."

He fails to note that he himself had been offering such nefarious code to the United States' enemies for several years, from sites such as this (ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/opensource).

McBride concludes that US prosperity depends on halting the menace. "The unchecked spread of Open Source software, under the GPL, is a much more serious threat to our capitalist system than US corporations realize," he writes.

In the context of dumping, McBride writes: "I contend that the ultimate predatory price is 'free'."

It isn't clear how the draft, dated January 7, found its way into the public domain or whether any Congresscritter has actually received a copy. But you can find it here (http://www.osaia.org/letters/sco_hill.pdf) [PDF, 370kb]. ®

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