OSDL Denies "Operation Open Gates" Linux Rewrite

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There's a rumor going around that Open Source Development Labs is launching an operation to rewrite substantial portions of the Linux stack to somehow circumvent theoretical patent violations. The operation, code-named "Operation Open Gates," was expected to be unveiled today by OSDL, the organization that steers the development of Linux and other open source technologies and employs Linus Torvalds, the first mover of Linux. It's a great story--well, sort of, in that breaking-news-journalism way--but it also happens to be untrue.

"It is total hogwash," says Lonn Johnston, owner of Page One, a public relations firm in Palo Alto, California, that has been representing OSDL for the past two years. "No one in OSDL has ever used that term, 'Operation Open Gates,' " he says.

What OSDL is launching today is a business incubator that focuses on open source. This center, called the Open Technology Business Center, will be located in Beaverton, the high-tech center in the state of Oregon, and one of the techiest places in the country.

According to Johnston, the whole Operation Open Gates story was fabricated by a renegade public relations person who apparently was interested in scaring up interest in the actual OSDL announcement, which will be made with Ted Kulongoski, the governor of Oregon, and Rob Drake, the mayor of Beaverton. Intel and IBM, two of the biggest supporters of OSDL, were apparently not too happy with the intimations of the story, which was published by G2 Computer Intelligence in its LinuxGram newsletter. That newsletter's editor, Maureen O'Gara, whom I have known for decades, rarely gets such things wrong (I could have said never, until this week), and the industry scuttlebutt is that she was led down the garden path.

In any event, the allegations in her story--that OSDL would rewrite Linux to circumvent potential patent infringements--would have understandably upset IBM, which is in the middle of a $3 billion lawsuit with The SCO Group after being accused of dumping closed-source Unix technology, which SCO contends is under its control, into the open-source Linux operating system. This is the last kind of trouble that IBM needs right now, and Intel has no desire to be sued by SCO, Microsoft, or anyone else that might try to make a patent violation claim against Linux or other open source programs that Intel contributes to.

When you think about it, the whole idea of rewriting code and making a public statement about it--much less getting a city and state to back it up with actual or political capital--is just plain illogical. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that you can rewrite code to get away from a copyright violation, but rewriting code to try to escape a software patent is much trickier. Impossible, even. Copyrights protect a particular string of code and how an idea is implemented in code, while patents protect the idea that can be embodied in many different pieces of code. Rewriting any Linux code will not protect Linux from patent violations.