SCO site attracts hacker’s wrath

BANGALORE: Log on to the SCO site and you are greeted by ‘425 HTTP Error’. Eric Raymond, a representative of the open source community believes that the war of words unleashed by the SCO CEO, did the damage. He says in hisposting "SCO/Caldera's site is being hit by a massive denial-of-service attack today. The timing, the scuttlebutt on Slashdot and elsewhere, and the contents of my mailbox all suggest strongly that the DOS attack was triggered by Darl McBride's slanderous interview accusing the community of being IBM's sock puppets, and my response to it. "

Raymond, however, appeals against such hack attacks. "With whatever authority I have, I ask that the DOS attack cease immediately. Please stand down *now*. We have better ways to win this fight. We're the good guys. But that doesn't matter if we aren't *seen* to be the good guys. We cannot fight our war using vandalism and trespass and the suppression of speech, or SCO will paint us as crackers and maybe win. Let's keep the moral high ground here. "

He appeals to the open source community to contribute in a better way by collecting SCO's published statements and "show how they have repeatedly contradicted themselves and lied about the facts."

"One of our big advantages over SCO is distributed brainpower. There are a lot of us, and we have excellent Internet-research skills. Want to strike a blow against SCO? Help convict them using their own public statements, their own 10Ks and 10Qs, all the press coverage, the material that's in their web and FTP sites. Collate. Assemble dossiers. The facts are with us, so gather and use the facts, " says Raymond.

"The confrontation between SCO and the open-source community has now escalated to open war. I suppose, in retrospect, that this was inevitable once SCO announced its intention to sue on a theory that would make all open-source licenses invalid. And we all know who's lurking like Emperor Palpatine behind Darl Vader, funding his lawsuit to the tune of at least $6,000,000<1> even if not otherwise pulling his strings," he states.