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McBride Interview from Utah SCO Protest

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the daily-dose-of-sco dept.

Andrew McNabb writes "Some of you may remember the protest we had in June in front of the SCO offices in Lindon, UT. Afterwards we had an interview with Darl McBride, where he said some very interesting things. More on the scoop, including a transcript and ogg of the discussion is available at Groklaw."

5 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Improvement of Linux by ultrabot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Isn't it funny that some time ago, Linux wasn't "good enough" for the enterprise, but nowadays, Linux is "evil" because it is too good and marginalizes the operating system as a revenue provider? I recall that a while ago, some f*wits at the SCO get-together complained that creating a compiler isn't profitable anymore, because of gcc.

    Anyway, it seems like we are winning.

    --
    Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
  2. That Darl... by Jameth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is a pretty smooth talker. He managed to almost always sound like he was saying something, even though he wasn't on quite a few occasions. Also, he only repeated himself about ten or twelve times.

    And that's not an insult, not by a long-shot. It's damn hard not to be repetitive in a situation like that, and he held out pretty good.

    Also, if I recall correctly, he distictively said SCO wasn't going after end users and Linux developers, just after IBM:

    P: The thing that we ask is that you just make it clear that you're attacking IBM, not us.
    Darl(22:38): I appreciate what you're saying. OK.
    P:Thanks.

    Of course, it's a little vague, but it's something.

    He managed to dodge all the questions about if running a specific configuration was in any way a violation (On a single proc? On a handheld?). Also, he seemed to imply that Debian was clean.

    Darl(8:55): I can't... Again, when I look at Debian versus what we're talking about with enter... I would really draw the line on enterprise class Linux versus what you're talking about. Right? 'Cause I think that there's a huge difference. I mean, when I hear what you're talking about, the thing that is interesting is, I would argue the point which is that's not where we're trying to go. Okay. Because our real beef is where the thing has been highly commercialized. When you get a 64-way system, and my guess is that the one you're using at home is not a 64-way system, right? That is really where we have a lot of concern.

    Also, the protestors were very level-headed, which was good. They had good questions and pushed hard without being rude.

  3. Re:Spanked by dimator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They asked McBride (more than once) why it wasn't just OK for the linux guys to remove the infringing code. He didn't answer the question at all, and instead danced around it. In fact, I can hardly find any question where he did answer in a straight-forward manner.

    It would be cool if he just answered "Greed." to every question, because that's what we're all thinking anyway.

    --
    python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
  4. Re:Not quite ... by Dav3K · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sure, Boies is getting paid, but that's hardly a win. Lawyers like to take cases that do more than just pay the bills. They like to win cases, for a variety of reasons. The short of is is that lawyers do not always win - but they usually manage to get paid, which can sometimes be a decent enough consolation prize to endure the loss.

    As for Microsoft, well sure they like the situation and were happy to pay licensing fees, knowing that it would help fuel SCO's fire. No conspiracy here, just taking advantage of the situation at hand. Hell, Sun did exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reasons. I don't think these two companies put Canopy up to anything - Canopy was already brewing this baby when the licensing fees came in.

  5. So here's the part that jumped out at me... by Ironica · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let me paraphrase one section of this exchange:

    "So, show us where Linux is in violation."

    "No, we can't do that, because then we'd be revealing protected code, and then there would be a problem."

    "So there's not a problem?"

    "No, there is a problem, which is that there's SCO protected code in Linux."

    "So if there's a problem, just tell us which code, and we can fix it."

    "No, I can't do that, it would cause a problem."

    This sounds like one of those loops that those AIs get into when talking to each other...

    --
    Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?