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McBride Interview from Utah SCO Protest
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."
or at least it was last time. mirror of article
When Darl says "So, if we turned around and opened this code up, like if I showed you the code, I mean, I've got it right here. . ..... I'm not going to show you."
This just show me that he is one of those guys that as a kid went around saying "Betcha can't guess what I'm thinking". Those kids used to get beat up or totally ignored. Hmmmm maybe that is the problem we are having today.
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The biggest mistake Boies made was to continue letting McBride et al to continue to speak publicly. So much of what they have said is now coming back to haunt them, especially in the Red Hat case.
It seems pretty obvious that McBride can stall this through his 4 quarters of profit, but his big payoff comes one year after that - I wonder what tricks he has up his sleeve to hang on that long?
Now do you remember?
McBride talks about a number of issues, such as SGI, whether SCOintended to sue end users or commercial only, how and when theydiscovered the alleged "infringement", Caldera's contributions to Linux, and whether Debian is a safeversion of GNU/Linux to use because of its noncommercial nature. He also tells them that SCO isn't interested in suing individual users or even small commercial users. Its beef, he says, is with the "Unix vendor community", UNIX-licensing companies switching to Linux and donating code to Linux so they don't have to pay any more royalties to SCO for Unix code, "the vendors that are getting aneconomic incentive to reducing the amount of royalties that they payby virtue of taking our property and putting it into Linux, then turnaround and saying it's a free system." He mentions that they were talking about 64-way systems, not home users.
He also says they found "hundreds of thousands of lines of code that are infringing against our contracts." Note the plural on contracts. He claims the increase in functionality in Linux is because of "vendors" that SCO has "confidentiality agreements" with. Again, note the plural.
A lot has changed since June, but it's clear that when this began, SCO had in mind a very small pool of targets, UNIX vendors being a small group of companies. What stands out is that I think you'll see how polite the Linux group is,how friendly the conversation was even when strong points were being made by each side, McBride praising them several times and at the end thanking them for their input and calling them "awesome". How different this reality is from the ugly portrait he has tried topaint in the media of users of GNU/Linux software allegedly "attacking" SCO. And when you hear or read it, ask yourself, how accurate were news reports of this event? But judge for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Transcriptof informal group chit-chat with Darl McBride
June20, 2003
Members of the Provo LinuxUsers Group (PLUG), along with other Linux and Unix group members andconcerned individuals in the area held a protest against SCO on June20, 2003. This protest began in front of SCO headquarters in theafternoon. The officialPLUG protest web site, with pictures and video, can be seen at http://mirror.lug-nut.com/
After protesting in frontof the SCO corporate offices (on a cul-de-sac), many in the groupmoved to a more visible location, a busy intersection nearby. Alittle while later, Darl McBride stopped by for an informal chit-chatwith the demonstrators on his way home. Here is what was said during the 23-minute conversation.
TheCast:
Darl: SCO CEO Darl McBride
P: Protester (thecollective group, with various individuals asking questions)
C: Cameraman
Pleasant Grove PoliceOfficer: Pleasant Grove Police Officer
Darl: So, how's theday going?
P: Oh, pretty well. We had more people than we expected. We talked to some of yourengineers outside, and they're really nice people.
Darl(0:11): So howdid all that go?
P: Oh, really well . . .
Darl(0:16): So youguys are just convinced that we're Satanic? Is that it?
P: No, no, no.
P: Just greedy,that's all.
P: We wouldn't usethose words. We would use different ones.
P:
Is this an unedited version of the transcript? Wow, if so, reading through the transcript, it appears Darl is not a very good spokesman for the company. He completely lost the initiative with the debate, has no real direction with which to respond to questions. On the other hand, not to defend SCO or anything, but the interviewer does things that always piss me off in interviews. Namely interrupting and quickly changing the subject before the interviewed gets a chance to adequately respond.
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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
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:
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.
Also, the protestors were very level-headed, which was good. They had good questions and pushed hard without being rude.
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.
Note how Darl never, ever addresses the GPL issue directly. He never says, "in regards to the allegations of copyright violation in regards to distribution of the Linux kernel, which is protected by the GPL, from our server all this time..." or anything similar. Here's the only time he seems to address the issue of the GPL, though again he does not mention the GPL:
It seems that the phrase a distribution is not the same as a donation is an allusion to the fact that they are still distributing linux, but they don't seem to think that distributing the code under the GPL is the same as donating it.
Well, in a sense, Darl is correct. It's not donating it; it is making the code available for all to use under the terms of the GNU Public License which states some things quite clearly which demonstrate that SCO itself is releasing this code to us under the terms of the GPL, for such use as we see fit, so long as we accept the license.
(WHEREIN SCO cannot terminate our right to use their source code which they have themselves distributed under the GPL, within the linux kernel, even if SCO themselves does not follow the terms of the GPL...)
(WHEREIN SCO has agreed to the terms of the GPL, which as per the prior paragraph they cannot revoke, by distributing the code under the GPL...)
(WHEREIN SCO grants a further license for distribution to anyone and everyone, under the terms of the GPL...)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
McBride probably believes this point though, and he has to, otherwise his case falls apart and he opens the company -- and himself personally -- to all sorts of abuse and contempt charges.
He spouts the same McDonald's crap as seen in Halloween IX, but strangely enough, no "protestor" mentioned that the only McD use of SCO is in the cash registers, which have less power than my non-hacked, Palm023.1 Palm III handheld, which I use more than my iPAQ. This is OpenServer, which was once Microsoft Xenix. McDonald's is not using SCO in their datacenters, just in their cash registers.
McBride throws out the "high-scalability" buzzwords and is never correctly challenged by these "protestors", most of whom by their questions and responses appear to be anti-globalisationalists waiting for the next G-8 summit. Great questions from them included:
Not much to see here. Move along...OggDropXP -- it decodes directly to the sound card, no hassle and no need to install (just unzip)
Now stop crying.
how long until
Darl(21:50): It's reasonable, except when the comment codes are the same, the humor lines in the comment code are the same, and the typos in the comment code are the same, then you start getting beyond... Ya know, it was kind of like, I learned this one day at school ... It becomes more of the... Those, to me, are really the DNA of the code here.
So, SCO can't show the code because that would be giving away their IP... ok, how about showing us the COMMENTS that are exact duplicates so we can track down the true original source of the comments? I am a software developer/architect and I can tell you that I have never seen code commented so well that someone could take the comment alone and recreat the code that went with it!
Show us the comments Darl!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
There has been no evidence that anybody has copied anything. SCO hasn't demonstrated anything or provided any facts to support their claim. When they tried, it was shown that their example was in public domain, or otherwise legally obtained code. Later, they retracted the claim from that example. Surely, if they have 100s of thousands of lines that they claim are infringing, they can show few to demonstrate that they actually have a valid claim. Again, they tried and were rebuked to a point where they had to retract their claims.
It's not a matter of what you think or what Darl thinks; it's the matter of factual evidence of which there has been none. And the one that they had produced (at the presentation) they have had to take their words back.
Actually, yes - SCO needs to provide evidence that infringement has occurred. The accusation is not a proof of anything. I can accuse IBM that they are infringing on my copyrights without providing any evidence - that does not mean I am entitled to $3 billion. Meanwhile, SCO gets nothing because they haven't shown any facts or proven anything in court or otherwise.
Yes, you are right, it is an outrage - SCO hasn't complied with the GPL license and, yet, feels free to distribute its own version of Linux - that is a gross copyright violation and a fact (something lacking from SCO's FUD). If SCO cannot comply to GPL's terms, then it has absolutely no rights to distribute software covered under it. In your own words, SCO is stealing Linux kernel code which it has no right to distribute other than under GPL, which SCO hasn't agreed to. SCO is, therefore, an IP thief. Notice, every time Darl gets asked about violating GPL (and quite a few times), he ignores the question, provides a one-line "we are fine" answer without any meaning, or simply changes the topic.
I'm unclear on what the police were there for. It sounds to me as if they randomly barged in and asked if their assistance was needed. Why exactly were they there?
That said... I'm frankly not sure I'd have been willing to talk to protesters if I were McBride. He almost seemed as if he was trying to be friendly, although I'm not sure how many questions he actually answered. (It seems that he completely evaded answering most of them?)
I'm also confused... There are several times when someone asks some sort of question, and he replies with something that makes absolutely no sense, like "Thanks" or "Yes" (to a question that couldn't possibly be construed as yes or no). What was up with that?
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suwain_2
It just occured to me that the correct open source solution to the SCO problem is for someone to develop an open source replacement for restaurant management.
That way, McDonalds franchises can enjoy an open source solution intead of purchasing SCO products. This seems to be Darl's favorite customer, he mentions them in nearly everytime he talks.
Develop open source solutions for SCO's top 3 cusmtomers and their stock price will go back where it belongs...
jeff