To Evil!
by Danny O'Brien

How do you work out who the movers and shakers are in the free software hacking world? For most of them, there's no income to be appraised, there's no stock market valuation to watch. What value can you give to these contributors, who work without care of reward, except maybe all those groupies hanging out at the stage door of the Sourceforge ftp servers?

Well, I guess you could review their software or something. Sadly, I suffer from a debilitating illness (which I shall not mention here) that tragically precludes me from doing actual research. So, instead, I have decided to evaluate those involved in our so-called industry in terms of what we all, I think, see it as.

A battle between good and evil. With the emphasis on evil, because, let's face it, who wants to hear about bloody goody two-shoes coders?

So who was the most bad in the world of open source last month? And can we get them to do it again, for the cameras?

August's candidates, in order of potential Dantean circle of Hell:

I. ROB ENDERLE

Rob "So often quoted that my own middle name has quotes around it" Enderle keynoted this year's SCO Forum, with an analysis "Free Software and the Idiots who Buy It".

As you might expect, this wasn't a talk with many Excel graphs and MATLAB analyses of relative IQs inside. En route to his conclusion, Rob explained to his audience that one of the reasons he has a bias toward Microsoft and against IBM (and by extension, IBM's support for Linux) is because when he worked at IBM, they were sneaky, whereas Bill Gates has been very good to him:

"With Microsoft my relationship goes deeper. A few years back, when I was first starting out as an analyst, I got myself into a lot of hot water by doing something I knew was wrong to prevent a crime from being committed... By all accounts I would have lost my job and probably had to change careers again if it weren't for Bill Gates personally coming to my defense and pointing out that what I did probably kept a lot of folks out of jail. He didn't have to do that and, to this day I doubt he even remembers he did, but I remember."

I don't know about you, but now I have this image in my mind of Rob Enderle as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock in the A-Team, with Bill "Hannibal" Gates breaking him out (and others) out of jail at the beginning of every episode so he can to help them analyse the hell out of a new market opportunity.

But is Enderle actually evil? I'd say Enderle's confession is not a confession of evil as an admission of humanity. His knee-jerk defences of SCO and attacks on open source come partly from his emotional experience at the hands of ... well, he's not clear on the facts, but something bad that happened to him a long time ago.

When you read his presentation, and after shifting a bit uncomfortably in your seat during the shoutier bits, you mostly ending up feeling sorry for him. He's clearly gone through a lot, and that definitely affects the tone of his opinions. Perhaps the evil here is that our industry doesn't assume our pundits are all too human. I, for instance, am gung-ho about open source because my family is being held hostage in Rob Malda's basement. But who fact-checks me, or Enderle, when we say something in public? No-one! Once again a sign that the motto "Consider the source" has more application than just fixing software.

II. Jörg Schilling

Jörg "Just trying to make an honest" Schilling took offence at SuSE's changes to his GPL cdrecord application, on the grounds that they'd patched it so much that it wasn't really Jörg Schilling's cdrecord at all, but more like some sort of awful Hollywood remake, like Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. To fix that, he stuck in a line which announced to SuSE users that their vendor was "known to ship bastardized and defective versions of cdrecord", then put in a comment above that SuSE wasn't allowed to change that line. You know, just in case they managed to bastardized the bastardization.

Cynical bystanders thought Jörg's harsh words had something to do with the addition of DVD burning features to SuSE's Jörg Schilling's Cdrecord (Jörg makes money from a commercial "cdrecord-dvdpro" which has the same added features). Jörg said it was more having to deal with answering tech support questions from people running software he hadn't even written, dammit.

Whatever the reason, by adding the comment, it turned out Schilling was breaking the GPL himself, by adding extra restrictions.

Now, we know that the furthermost pits of hell are reserved for those who break licensing agreements (unless its clickthrough, where you get put in purgatory until the law can be clarified). But we should also give pause before we place the epaullettes of satan on someone who, let's be fair, learnt the intricacies of the SCSI bus so that we do not.

Anyone who has played with SCSI knows that the interface is, frankly, Lovecraftian. A few terminators and DIP switches in, and you're constantly running saving throws for your sanity. Jörg's moment of alleged evil was fleeting, and he removed the restriction in the subsequent increment of cdrecord. Let's say that he was possessed by some old ide-scsi bug, and speaking in tongues at the time.

Not evil; a tang of the Yog-Sothoth in the air, maybe, but not evil.

III. Gareth Jones

Final contestant for this month's "Most Likely to Go Bwah-hah-hah Out Of Context" comes from an unexpected source. In my homeland of the United Kingdom, the Chief Operating Officer of "3", Hutchinson Mobile's un-googlable 3G network, was caught saying this: "People don't want open access, that's not what our customers tell us they want" he said. "Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts."

Reactions to the comment have been mixed. In between the pitter-patter of slapped heads across Greater Geekland, most thought this was a little, shall we say, short-sighted. Here, they said, is a company waiting to be eaten by the free market Grues. Others defend Jones saying that - well, if the customer's don't want it, why give it to them?

Me, I think Jones temporarily represents the living embodiment of all that is eeeevil (for the microscopic values of real eeevil involved in our fairly innocuous industry).

Fast, cheap, mobile data networks represents an amazing opportunity for innovation, but is currently saddled in Compuserve-era walled gardens.

It's understandable that companies like "3", having spent so much on license fees and network roll-out, should want to recoup that cost by acting as highwayman on their own routes, but it's simply bad policy to try and hold back the thousands of applications and the millions of people that those network could be used to talk to.

Without access to the handset, and the handset's access to the wider net, not only will we have to wait to get open source applications in the mobile sector, but we'll have to wait for the true flowering of creativity in the mobile world to arrive. It's nuts to assume, as so many telco providers do, that they can have a monopoly on creativity using their phones. Demanding a monopoly on the destinations people will visit, the packets that will fly, the people you will meet using it, is just evil in my book. Pure eeeevil.

Yes, the free software world runs on purest ethics, and some of us have been sniffing the fumes of that heady fuel longer more deeply than the rest of us.

If you have any recommendations for sources of evilitude in September, mail me at 2evil@osdir.com, and I'll try and banish them with my incantations. Until then, hunch your backs and raise a toast - To evil!

Danny O'Brien is the co-editor of NTK incarnate.

To Evil! will appear monthly.