U.S. may be left behind in open-source technology, Red Hat's Szulik warns

'The United States is increasingly becoming a fast follower,' he said

By Robert McMillan

August 3, 2004 12:00 PM ET

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IDG News Service - SAN FRANCISCO -- Portraying his company as part of a global effort to create a larger worldwide software industry, Red Hat Inc. CEO Matthew Szulik opened the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here today with a warning that the U.S. runs the risk of missing out on the move toward open-source.
Szulik implied that the U.S.'s attitude toward open-source, as witnessed by recent developments in U.S. law and copyright, education and patent policies, could threaten this country's pre-eminence as a technology supplier. "The United States is increasingly becoming a fast follower," he said.
"Why is it that I can meet with the president of India, who spent an hour with me talking about how he was going to use open-source software ... to move his educational system to the 21st century, yet I struggle in my town just to get an appointment with the local school committee to introduce them to this thing called ... Linux?" Szulik asked.
Szulik, who is also Red Hat's president and chairman, called for changes to U.S. patent and copyright policy, saying that current policy is "potentially" unconstitutional. "We believe that the current process of not requiring full disclosure of software and source code allows copyright registration to create an unnecessary threat," he said.
Questions about intellectual property liability and open-source have been widely discussed in the industry over the past year, following the launch of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM by Unix vendor The SCO Group Inc. The Lindon, Utah-based company claims that Linux infringes on its intellectual property and that IBM hurt SCO's Unix business by illegally contributing source code to Linux.
Red Hat sued SCO in connection with its intellectual property claims and is seeking a declaratory judgment from the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware that would rule SCO's claims regarding copyright infringement untrue.


Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Image Credit: Todd Weiss

During his keynote speech, Szulik didn't comment on the Red Hat lawsuit, but he offered a few words of criticism in obvious reference to SCO.
"One year ago I stood in front of you ... and we faced a unique challenge: The industry's version of The Sopranos were willing to challenge and create unsubstantiated threats of claims against intellectual property as a way to throw broken glass on the highway of progress," he said.
After the SCO threat emerged, the Linux community "rallied," and momentum behind the free operating system increased, he said. "We now start to see the availability of a Linux operating system being able to run

Reprinted with permission from

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Story copyright 2009 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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