Bravo, Daniel Lyons

Today, Daniel Lyons issued a mea culpa for his initial coverage of the SCO case against Linux. That calls for some respect, as it takes true grit to do something like that.

Of course, SCO's claims didn't seem to have much in the way of credibility as far as shutting down Linux. Whenever SCO said they had something, the Linux community asked to see it... and it didn't happen. While some of the people who are pro-Linux, such as myself, acted at least partly on faith - when it came to cold hard facts, there wasn't much in the way of supporting Linux during the SCO debacle because SCO never really said anything that could be sensibly refuted. Smoke and mirrors. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

On the flip side, it is easy to imagine that people supporting SCO were much the same. People on either side of this issue wanted to believe, and in between those two crowds true journalism can easily succumb to one side or the other. You can only report what you have from credible sources, and because of the nature of SCO's claims they made themselves the only credible source on what they were saying. That they have ended up being so lacking in credibility simply demonstrates, among other things, how much the legal field depends on the Court of Public Opinion.

His last words in his article are something I completely agree with:

...SCO is road kill. Its lawsuit long ago ceased to represent any threat to Linux. That operating system has become far too successful to be dislodged. Someday soon the SCO lawsuits will go away, and I will never have to write another article about SCO ever again. I can't wait.

I think the only people who think otherwise are SCO's lawyers.