July 01, 2005
Bizarre lawsuit

It's either an elaborate joke or just plain bizarre.
This claims to be a complaint filed in a US court against any and all "anti-SCO" advocates filed by one Jeffery Merkey. Merkey claims that a large number of people are involved in a concerted effort to smear his name, defame mormons (he's from Utah) and do other kinds of damage. The claims in the lawsuit are completely bizarre. Among many other things open source software is made indirectly responsible for beheadings in Iraq, and in general aiding international terrorism and other kinds of evil by bringing technology into the hands of evildoers. At this point you will not be surprised that according to Merkey open source is also responsible for the creation of weapons of mass murder and mass destruction.
Even more bizarrely, Merkey refers to open sourcers as "extreme right wing". Granted, there's a libertarian bent to tech, but if you wanted to pin a political tag on open source it would be left wing, not right.
Among other claims is a story that Bruce Perens wants to put Merkey on a hitlist as a person to be killed - this seems to be based on this misunderstanding.

What makes the story completely bizarre is that Merkey runs Linux (tried to get a netcraft readout on his server but it seems he blocks netcraft)

Posted by Claus at July 01, 2005 09:29 PM | TrackBack (0)
Comments (post your own)

Indeed:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 15:54:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.49 (Fedora)
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 3931
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Posted by: Nikolaj Nyholm on July 3, 2005 2:37 PM
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