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Wired on McBride
leifbk writes "Wired has a very interesting feature article on how Darl McBride and his sidekick Mike Anderer rose to fame. Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'" A very thorough retelling of the legend that is SCO.
As I and others pointed out on groklaw when this was first posted back in an OT line, this quote shows that they admit to pulling this job in the hopes of being bought out. Blepp said the same at his university interview in Germany. Definately illegal trying to extort money this way.
Happy Trails
Digital IP is in such a fucked shape right now that I can actually see these idiot winning.
A few days ago a Managment friend of mine who used to be CS and I were talking about IP and patents. Suprisingly we agreed that the system is out of whack.
For example, if I built a washing mahcine that got clothes clean by rinsing them every 5 minutes I can get a patent for it. Then if he takes my design but instead of every 5 minutes his rinses every 3 minutes and also reverses the spin it is a new design and i cant sue him. Now lets go to the current digital state. If I made a program that defragmented a disk drive using algorithim x I can get a patent. Now if he dreates a defrag program that uses algothim y I can sue him and win even though our programs are as different as the two earlier washing mahcines.
Secondsun
PS:(I know a defrag program is not the best analogy but it demonstrates my point)
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
What I find curious is why a company would hire somebody with McBride's background. Suppose you're the board of what is now SCO. You've got a declining proprietary Unix business and need somebody who can turn the company around. Presumably you'd look for somebody with a combination of good management skills and the combination of technical and market knowledge to figure out what direction the company should move in. McBride has none of this. From his record it looks like he wasn't much good as a manager. IKON fired him for his M&A work, which doesn't suggest that he has good market sense. He clearly has no understanding of the technology. It looks like the only thing he did well was when he was Novell's guy in Japan. I don't see why he would be attractive for SCO unless the board planned an IP scam from the outset and wanted somebody with experience in that area. If that's the case, it isnt the case that obtaining value from their IP was McBride's idea and that they discovered the alleged infringement after he came on board.
I worked for IQorder.com at the time that it was apparently sued (Sorry, "asked to pay") by McBride's patent friends. This guy gets around.
Suing random startups over BS patents and now suing Linux users over BS claims.
McBride of Frankenstein and Senator "Let's let the RIAA to hack file sharers legally" Hollings are some of the highest profile Mormons in their little church. I hope they get excommunicated (but then, they would lose all that tithing).
The scary thing is that McBride has seven kids. I hope that being a prick isn't genetic. I really hope that his kids see what kind of human being their dad is and don't follow in his footsteps.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
But we've allowed them to succeed despite the fact that they've never contributed a damn thing.
Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine. Did he ever become as rich as Darl McBride or Mike Anderer?
As you point out, this is not exactly a new phoneomena, it's interesting that some of the most important poeple in the history of of our species either weren't interested in money or got screwed over financially....
SCO/Caldera SOLD Linux kernel under GPL, how can they resind it now?
...
The very day that McBride took the job as CEO in 2002, the company, then a friendly Linux reseller known as Caldera Systems,
I rememder seeing Caldera Linux in Compusa. (For some reason, I seem to remember reading it was based on Debian, of all distributions. Maybe I'm wrong here, tho'.) Comes in a shrink-wrap box, screenshots on the cover, manuals, cdroms, same as any other distribution. And thus , like any other distribution, has the GPL , and all the sourse code with it (presumably-- I don't have it in my possession)
What I'm getting at, is the very company in question, SCO, sold the product under those terms. So how can they now go back on it?
You could imagine a defense lawyer asking McBride in court: Is it not the case that your company sold the product 'Linux' under those very terms, the GPL? And, thus, those customers have the right, under the terms you sold it under, to copy and distribute it, with likewise GPL applying to those copies?
Am I being redundant?
THEY sold it (including the kernel and src) under GPL, so GPL has to apply. And if they didn't sell it under GPL, under what license did they sell it? And can't the kernel copyright holder sue Caldera/SCO for changing the kernel license?
it's all rediculous.
I work for a company that has Ikon printers. They use Sun Solaris as their print "controllers" that rip the data (postscript, pcl, etc) and send it to the printers.
We almost got a "TCO Box" that connects an OCe printer with native Bus & Tag (old IBM mainframe technology) to a TCP/IP network. It ran Caldera Linux. Which they're in the process of switching to Suse (though, that's not set in stone).
One interesting thing is that in the price breakdown the "Linux operating system" was $700! I asked what type it was, but never got a response. I wouldn't have known it was Caldera unless I was there to see the tech boot it up and configure it.
While I'm happy to see any company see the light of Linux, it's too bad they succumed to the dim light that Caldera turned into.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.