Slashdot Mirror
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.
Assemble an army of fainting geeks and march to Anderer's house!!!
Think about it. The whole idea of history is that the victors will tell it. The losers will be written out of it or at the very worst written into it as very bad characters.
McBride is about as bland as you get. He is the CEO of a company that produces nothing. He is fighting a movement arguably composed of nothing. He is the Don Quixote of the software world except he doesn't have half the attractiveness.
Leave him to his money, he's got plenty of it. Linux will survive this idiotic onslaught, and whatever other challenges there are to come.
Let's focus on making Linux better for all of us, rather than fighting windmills.
Good idea, eh muchacho?
I have been pwned because my
There *is* very good documentation on where the code has come from -- despite what the article says.
Sheesh.
At least this is better than your average mainstream coverage.
I've been wired on McBride, but it made my nose bleed and I felt completely awful the next day. I'll stick to smoking crack... cheaper and less of a hangover.
That's not being competetive. That's being an ASSHOLE. What kind of pers-- I think I just answered my question.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
A very interesting article overall, showing that Darl was involved in many other situations before SCO where he was involved in trying to make revenue by nothing but IP violation claims and other lawsuits. It tends to focus on a lot of the linux stuff (obviously) but I find the earlier history much more interesting.
From these "humble beginnings" to intentionally thinking up ideas to patent, simply to take people to court over infringement, we can see that clearly he was the best man to pull SCO's slumping sales up with the last-resort tactic of trying to enforce some concocted IP violations. Only this time, he appears to have bitten off more than he can chew.
I'm thinking there's a very good chance we'll see history repeat itself. ;)
Father of SEVEN ?
God help us!
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
He is bland, a braggart, and doesn't know when to shut up, but what he is trying to do (namely, the profit off of intellectual property) cannot be ignored. The wired article makes a great point on the last page: "Darl McBride is right about one thing: There's a big problem with Linux. <snip> The problem is that the free operating system created by Torvalds and his collaborators is poorly documented."
To be honest, if it wasn't going to be McBride, it would be someone else down the line that would exploit this little problem. Most open source advocates would hate to say it, but with this kind of question looming over Linux as an operating system, some bigger companies won't look at it in the same light as they would, say, Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris. It is good that, not unlike a band-aid, this is getting done now so that even the big corporations can know what most of us already do; without a question or a doubt, Linux is safe to use.
I see no windmills here, but a true dragon that needs to be slayed.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
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.
The Linux Show had an interesting feature this week about SCO and the Linux editor, Steve Vaughan from Eweek presented his view of Darl McBride after having met him multiple times since the whole SCO issue started. According to him, Darl McBride is an achiever, and if you can, for a second, believe in what he's doing, like he does, you will make amazed at his dedication. According to him, McBride will not give up until the last vestiges of SCO are thrown out of court. He will accept anything other than a defeat in the court. It is an interesting show to listen to, give it a shot
Warning: Invective ahead. This post is rated 'R'.
The article contains about a billion inaccuracies, but I'm hoping that at least McBride's quotes haven't been altered, or this fact for that matter: Caldera was spending $4 for every $1 it made. Think about that for a second. Redhat is making money from selling services on top of GNU/Linux. IBM is making money from selling services on top of GNU/Linux. But, Caldera is losing money.
Why is that? Could it be that Caldera's business model was boxing and and selling software through regular retail channels? Could it be that Caldera wasted a lot of development effort trying to take ownership of a product that was mostly GNU (read: industry standard) at the core by attempting to build proprietary extensions on it? I've reserved personal judgment about McBride up until this point: He's a shithead, pure and simple. No one will ever be able to convince him of that, but perhaps SCO shareholders could convince him that he's not working for fucking Microsoft, so that business model doesn't apply to his company. Attention dumbfuck McBride: Pick a business model that's profitable!
Let's imagine for a moment some other famous CEO reacted the same way when the status quo began to crumble. Let's take Andy Grove on example. When Intel was losing ground the Japanese memory manufacturers, did they fold up shop, cancel R&D, and refuse change while suing both makers and buyers or foreign memory chips? Sure they dabbled in some protectionist tactics, but eventually they just changed their focus to something that the Japanese could not readily produce cheaply in mass quantities.
I'd predicted last year that SCO's purpose was not a stock pump-and-dump scheme, but an attempt destroy open source, specifically those projects that fall under the GPL; An attack on the common infrastructure of the "enemy". The article contains, in McBride's own words, an admission of such.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
First, what MS is prompting is software licensing, not closed software. They want everyone to pay a fee to gain the privilege to use a piece of software, and in the process agree to certain things that will insure a future cash-flow. All MS wants is money in exchange for software. This was somewhat of a new idea. The software itself was the product. It was no longer part of a service. If you wanted service, that will cost extra. It extended this concept through licensing with third parties. The purchaser of a system was now entitled to no MS support. The fee only covered the use of the software. Closed source or whatever is just a means to that end. One advantage to this is that hardware, software, and services are sold separately, which creates a confusion about responsibility and minimizes support costs.
IBM, OTOH, sells services. They want to sell you the hard and soft ware as well, but they are a solutions provider. As far as I know, they always have been. Obviously back in the 70's there was no software, so they had to write it. This worked until MS told everyone that MS could provide the same service for a lesser price, which was more or less a lie, but whatever. Now IBM is just trying to make the business model work. They can put their solutions around whatever OS. They just want to sell the solutions. It turns out that the best way they can gain market-share back from MS is by supported OSS. MS really has no defense against this because they have no reputation as a service provider.
Sun is just trying to survive. The settlement is part of that survival and cannot be taken as evidence of anything. Sun has been abused as much as SCO. They have had as much technology 'misappropriated'. Unlike SCO, they are not carpet bombing the industry. They are working hard to create a competetive product.
Additionally, there are often question of why IBM did not buy out SCO. My belief is that we cannot assume they did not try. Until recently a majority of SCO stock was held by insiders, and much of the rest by institutional investors. I believe this means that it would have been very hard for IBM to just buy a block of stock at market prices, then go in and replace the board. They would have had to negotiate with the board, and one assumes that the board would have laughed at a 20 million, or even 80 million, dollar offer, which was the SCO market cap.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Summary:
McBride and Anderer are two business world vagrants that made their millions from aquisition bonuses. Neither is particularly adept at actually running a business. The SCO situation blew up in their faces. The end.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
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.