Unfairly indicting Sun for its SCO testimony?
Pamela Jones of Groklaw rightly takes umbrage that Sun Microsystems apparently stood by while The SCO Group attempted to foul the pedigree of Linux, but how much righteous indignation is warranted is debatable. Jones writes:
And what an icky role Sun played, to judge from (Novell's Greg) Jones' description of the agreement. Look at all the damage that resulted from Sun's silence, the litigation that never had to happen....And as far as Linux is concerned, why didn't Sun speak out to help?
It had in the power of its hand the ability to protect Linux users. Silence. For years and years and years. While folks got sued, and the FUD campaign raged on.
Yes, but this overlooks one convenient point: Sun was competing with Linux. Hard. Not only did it not have a legal obligation to speak out, it may well have had a legal obligation to not speak out.
Every contract that I've negotiated in the last few years has, at the customer's or partner's insistence, a section in it that prohibits disclosure of the contract. I would guess that similar wording is to be found in the partnership agreement between Sun and SCO.
Even if Sun had an obligation, legal or otherwise, to disclose Linux's clean bill of health, why would it? We can argue that it may have had a moral obligation, but it also has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, which arguably wouldn't have been well-served by propping up a competitor, however unfairly maligned.
I'm not suggesting that I personally could have stood by and watched, had I worked for Sun, but I also think it's important not to burden Sun's efforts to remedy some errors of its past with all the good it's doing now. I believe in that pesky repentance thing. :-)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
And I think they did and were.
Life goes on.
So there was effective "confidentiality clause". And since then, until 2007 Sun withheld this agreement from Novell until forced, by Court order, to provide it under force of subpeona.
The original subject behind all this stuff is the interview at which Mr. Phipps claims Sun "reformed" after 2002, and they manifestly didn't. Greed, built on contractual lies built by stealing Novell's property, and hiding the enabling agreement from the victim for years and years, is NOT a virtue. I think that talk about "...justified by preserving/enhancing Shareholder value" is a lot like testimony and out-of-court statements made by guilty Enron executives and their attourneys, just a variation of the "look at the Wookie!" defense.
Astroturf here. And laziness. "She" is spin, non-carnate. She is corporate.
- by RamboTribble June 27, 2008 7:35 AM PDT
- While I wouldn't denigrate Sun particularly for their actions, nor would I laud them. Troubling, however, is the nature of your defense of them. It is just a variation of the "I was only following orders," defense. Since at least 1945, that just plain hasn't washed.
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