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Darl McBride Interview
mpsmps writes "vnunet.com has a long interview with SCO CEO Darl McBride devoted entirely to the SCO/IBM suit. McBride radiates confidence, describing SCO's contracts as "bullet-proof." He says he thinks IBM is desperate to buy SCO because "the last thing [IBM wants] to hear is the testimony that is going to come out," but that SCO isn't interested in being acquired. Read the interview for much more on these and other topics." See also part 2 and part 3 of the interview.
Now, this must be the final proof that McBride is delerious:
"You go back to SCO's brand in the 1990s and it was Unix on Intel. SCO was primed to seize the multibillion-dollar server market of Unix on Intel that hit in the early 2000s that has in fact shifted over to Red Hat."
SCO was primed to go down the drain, even without Linux anywhere. Most people were already migrating or had migrated off SCO before Linux became a contender; migrating to Solaris or Windows, or basically anything that wasnt quite as bad as SCO.
The man is completely delusional and should be locked up in a small padded room for his own good.
I can tell you that this is totally and utterly...
True.
It was a pile of rubbish, we had it running our net connection, all it had to do was act as a mail server and dial-up modem. It fell over on a regular basis and was generally a pain to work with. I also had to develop some Curses applications on it and ended up developing them in Eiffel with a thin layer onto Curses which meant I could do the work on Solaris.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm afraid that's ancient history by now, though.
SCO found some mysterious amendment to their contract that said they do in fact have those ownership rights, and while Novell couldn't find a copy of the file in its own archive, it had a valid Novell signature.
Quoth McBribe: "Novell took its ball and went home."
Six sick
System V was/is a particular version of the UNIX codebase. System V-style init scripts were just a small part of that - and I don't think that SCO would have grounds to sue over anyone using a particular style of init scripts. I still doubt the veracity of SCO's claims, but of course, without their evidence (whatever that may be) it's hard to judge.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
There are two different kinds of code here.
One is code which SCO claims has been directly copied from Unix into Linux. This is the basis for the letter sent to Linux users.
The other is code which SCO claims that IBM has contributed to Linux in violation of its contract. This is the basis for the lawsuit against IBM.
The former code is what could be discovered using source code comparisons.
The latter code is known: it is JFS, NUMA, etc., which IBM developed and then contributed to Linux. SCO claims that these projects are derived works of Unix, and, per the IBM contract, SCO claims ownership over that code.
No, The SCO Group (TSG) pays lawyers to do barratry.
The Santa Cruz Operation is probably the company you had in mind, and they don't exist. They sold their UNIX rights to Caldera and renamed themselves Tarantella. And apparently are still producing code. Hopefully, they're now producing good code, because I've seen SCO UNIX and it ain't a pretty sight.
AFAICT TSG (a glove-puppet for The Canopy Group) have never lifted their finger to any creative or constructive work in their entire collective lives. Their only visible occupation is "suer". They make money from suing.
I agree. But this is not what TSG are claiming.
TSG do claim to own derivative works (including hardware) that IBM wrote and the agreement says IBM have the rights to. They are also claiming ownership by derivation of every operating system in the world. I'll read that again. TSG claim to own every OS there is. Even Windows. I haven't seen them explicitly claim to own DOS yet, but hey, they sued (and I think rightfully for a change) over what Microsoft did to DR-DOS.
So... you're for who?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I consider shorting stock a very dangerous practice. While I do believe that this will end with SCO ceasing to exist as a corporate entity, the problem is it's quite hard to tell exactly when they'll be dead and buried, and wether or not the stock will go up or down until a certain point in the future due to gullible investors and their incompetent stock analysts. Can you say how long the lawsuit will take? Can you predict the near term actions and statements of IBM's lawyers and the courts decisions? As long as there are people actually listening to, and believing, SCO's press releases it gets very hard to guess where the stock is going over the next few months, or even year, even while one may be certain they're going to lose.
Just because a stock is massively inflated due to hot air, groundless claims and unfounded accusations it doesnt mean it cant get even more inflated before collapsing. And in this case, how long it is going to stay inflated depends mostly on timing in the legal system and the psychology of investors, rather than any hard facts.
SCO's legal costs are being paid under a contingency arrangement (about halfway down)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Note the deliciously ambiguous statement:
This only means that SCO's won't have to bear the brunt of Boies's contract without talking about the other legal fees.
If this theory is confirmed, IBM can still bleed their cash to death by dragging the case.