Walk Alone

Usually, I receive mails I could do without from my Orkut contacts. But I found this one anecdote interesting. A school friend, Nikhil Sukhthankar, sent it to me.

Hello friends!! Well, Jayant , my friend, told me the following incident which I wish to share with you. It has had a deep impact on my thinking.

In the Diwali vacation, Jayant and his couple of friends had gone to Delhi.

They rented a taxi for local sight-seeing. The driver was an old Sardar, and boys being boys, Jayant and his pals began cracking Sardarji jokes, just to insinuate the old man.

But to their surprise, the fellow remained unperturbed.

At the end of the sight-seeing, they paid up the hire-charges. The Sardar returned the change. Moreover, he gave each one of them one rupee extra and said, (in Hindi, of course),

”Son, since morning you have been telling Sardarji jokes. I listened to them all and let me tell you, some of them were in a very bad taste. Still, I don’t mind coz I know that you are young blood and are yet to see the world. But I have just one request. Here I am giving you one rupee each. Give it to the first Sardar beggar that you come across in this city.”

Jayant continued,” That one rupee coin is still with me. I couldn’t find a single Sardar begging on the streets of Delhi.”

That’s something to think about. The anecdote finished off with the following paragraph.

Friends, we all love Sardar jokes. But the fact of matter is that Sikhs are one of the most prosperous and diversified communities in the world. The secret behind their universal success, according to me, is their willingness to do any job with utmost dedication. A Sardar will drive a truck or set up a roadside garage or a dhaba, but he will never beg on the streets.

If only we all were Sardars.

And it took four long years. SCO got its Unix IP claims thrown out. No doubt about it - Novell owns Unix IP. That will have a domino effect on SCO’s case against IBM (and many other companies). If SCO doesn’t own Unix IP, there arises no case of IBM violating it by (allegedly) inserting Unix code into Linux code.

The seed of this litigation sprouted after IBM and SCO had a fallout over Project Monterey. When IBM moved on after declaring the project dead, SCO was left without a viable plan for the future. Decision: screw the tech vision, sue the f***kers. What should have been a contract dispute spiraled into an industry-wide battle. Net result: SCO is D-E-A-D.

Just proves that it is only the lawyers who benefit from litigation.

What I’m thinking here is - do we hold Sun and Microsoft accountable for their part in supporting SCO? Both the companies bought licenses from SCO which enabled it to finance its litigation activities. Even so, Sun did a nice turnaround. OpenOffice, if nothing else, redeems them from their past. And trust me, Sun has given Open Source a lot more than OpenOffice.

On the other hand, Microsoft has been a persistent bug. Sun bought licenses for a few Unix drivers (it had originally licensed Unix from AT&T) but MS bought a complete Unix license just for the heck of it. Pray tell, what has MS done on the Unix scene? Nothing. It was just an excuse for pumping money into SCO.

Indeed, the MS-Novell deal is more of an insurance for Microsoft than for Novell’s Linux customers. After all, Microsoft licensed Unix from SCO, who had no friggin’ rights to license it in the first place! Oops!

Meanwhile, it is surprising that while MS can count the number of patents violated, it can’t list them out. Open Source developers are waiting. Making people wait is bad manners.

FUD, FUD, FUD.