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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.
... that is to say, they're a living oxymoron.
If SCO isn't interested in being acquired, then why are they sure acting like they are? All this posturing is pointing to wanting to be bought out to make them shut up.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I'm more interested in what The SCO Group had to say about Novell's letter to them. There seems to be not much talk about it. The last I heard Novell was going to challenge SCO on Unix ownership.
What if IBM is guilty? What if they did misappropriate some proprietary code, on purpose or other wise? Sure the kernel folks will replace it and life will move on, but that will be very damaging to Linux. While we are all throwing stones at SCO maybe we shouldn't completely turn our backs on IBM. Their "support" of Linux may end up doing a lot of harm. Plus they may already be cooking up something they intended to replace AIX and Linux in the next five years or so. Before there was MS there was IBM.
- vphl
SCO is doing this to try and inflate, and keep inflated, a share price based on an extremely thin balloon. To keep that going, they have to keep shouting. If IBM makes specific replies, then SCO has something to use in the next press release. If they don't, it all has to come from within SCO. The longer it goes on, the greater the chance of SCO coming up with manifest contradictions, allegations that can easily be shown to be untrue in court, actual libel. SCO cannot afford to shut up and cannot afford simply to repeat themselves over and over, as with no new content the press will lose interest.
My personal interest in this is that 20 years ago we were involved with someone whose public utterances were very like those of Mr. McBride. He came up with so many allegations that our attorney started to believe that we were the liars, on the basis that no-one would make so many claims if they weren't true. But then it came to court...the originals of documents were mysteriously not to hand (faked photocopies). Witnesses were mysteriously unavailable. Foreign Chambers of Commerce had never heard of the companies he claimed we were in collusion with, who also seemed never to have occupied the claimed addresses. The guy fired his own lawyers. And suddenly he lost the case, a judge was telling him that he was considering whether there was a possibility of perjury, and he had huge legal bills to pay for both sides. I seriously believe that this man was so out of his tree that even as he faked documents, he actually believed he was reproducing something that "really" existed in the perfect world he lived in. Never underestimate the power of human self-delusion.
Not, of course, that I am suggesting for one moment that Mr. McBride is engaging in any improper activities, deluding himself, or seeking to rig the share price of a junk stock. I am sure that he is a totally ethical businessman and the merits of his case will soon become apparent.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
"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."
He's falling for a logical fallacy here. 'Unix on Intel' caught on largely because of Linux and its liberal licensing. No proprietary Unix vendor ever made substantial in roads in this area, and I doubt any would have. When ever asked about the benefits of Unix-on-Intel, the answers people give for it are the general openness of the platform and it being less expensive than a proprietary solution. This is not compatable with a license-fee-extorion scheme.
Its no different than saying "We just sold a million foobars for a dollar each. If only we had charged a million dollars each, we'd be gazillion-ares!
I don't have much direct experience with SCO, but perhaps a couple of interesting anecdotes at least.
My first brush with it was the same time as my introduction to Linux, early 90sish I don't remember the year right off. A guy I knew, a friend's step-dad, was an old unix guy and after getting sacked from Honeywell where he had worked for decades he was trying to make a business on his own around Unix on Intel. He had a SCO dealership for a couple of months. He was constantly bitching about it, poor performance, crazy to set up, crashing for no reason, damnable intrusive copy protection system built in, and the price was pretty high too. We were experimenting with slackware at the time and showed it to him... a month later he threw SCO out the window and never went back.
Much later, only a couple of years ago, I worked a bit for a place that used SCO to drive a couple hundred dumb terminals. That was just a temp job while I found real work, and I wasn't in on the Admin side of it, but I know that the guys that were started cursing whenever you mentioned SCO. They were working on moving the system to Redhat instead, but of course it was proprietary no-source stuff, and while they had it running it was still freezing and doing odd things occasionally and they hadn't figured out why yet, so it was just in testing still. They were planning to junk SCO as soon as they could get it working stable too, and gritted their teeth and screaming a lot about exactly the same things my friends stepdad had been bitching about nearly 10 years earlier it seemed to me.
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