vnunet.com Interviews SCO CEO Darl McBride

by , 1:30 PM EDT, June 30th, 2003

vnunet.com, a UK news site, has posted a three-part interview with Darl McBride, CEO of The SCO Group. In it, the interviewer asks Mr. McBride many questions about the ongoing SCO vs. IBM case, such as how he expects IBM to return all copies of AIX, whether Mr. McBride thinks the Linux kernel's source code includes SCO intellectual property, and more.

The subject of the interview stems from a lawsuit from SCO that accuses IBM of allowing Unix source code to make its way into the Linux kernel, which SCO says is in violation of IBM's Unix license from SCO. The company has asked for US$3 billion in damages, and has pulled IBM's license to distribute AIX, Big Blue's version of Unix. For its part, IBM denies the entire thing, and has said that its license for Unix doesn't allow SCO to pull distribution rights. In the meanwhile, Novell says that while SCO may own the trademarks to Unix, it (Novell) owns the intellectual property in Unix. [Editor's Note: Our story originally stated that IBM owns Novell, a mistake which Novell's PR department quickly let us know about. We have edited the story accordingly. - Editor]

Obviously this is a hugely complex issue, and one that has set the open source community on fire. The interview sheds some light on how SCO's CEO sees his company's strategy. From vnunet.com:

How, in practice, could IBM return all copies of AIX?
I suppose the simple requirement is 'to return or destroy'. We haven't made that language up. That was in the contract that we picked up that AT&T and IBM had agreed to.

So I guess you simply take the copies of AIX that are out there and send them back to us, or you destroy them and give us notice of the date of destruction. It calls for that in the contract to certify that destruction has taken place.

[...]

Are you still saying categorically that there is offending code in the Linux kernel?
Yeah. That one is a no-brainer. When you look in the code base and you see line-by-line copy of our Unix System V code - not just the code itself, but comments to the code, titles that were in the comments and humour elements that were in the comments - you see that everything is taken straight across.

Everything is exactly the same except they have stripped off the copyright notices and pretended it was just Linux code. There could not be a more straightforward case on the Linux side.

[...]

Would you actually like to be bought?
No. Absolutely no. A few months ago that may have been an interesting notion, but from where we sit right now we are very strong. Our employees are strongly engaged on what we are doing. We are making record profits and see huge opportunities because of the licence rights we have around the Unix business.

You can read the full interview at vnunet.com's Web site. There are three parts, with links at the bottom of the article to pages 1 and 2.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Listen to the arguments laid out in the interview, and it may well seem as if SCO has a point. After all, according to Mr. McBride, public sentiment is turning in favor of SCO, and many independent parties have expressed outrage at IBM's infringement.

In reality, however, it is hardly that simple. SCO has still not shown the world the parts of Unix it said were copied into Linux, making it difficult for people like Linus Torvalds to verify it. In addition, Novell's claims on the issue are far from having been dismissed, as Mr. McBride suggests. From our vantage point, public sentiment is also still running staunchly against the company, but Mr. McBride does hang out in different circles.

Be that as it may, we find the interview interesting. As with many public relations stunts, it is more an attempt to shape public opinion through assertions, rather than facts, than anything else, but that's part of Mr. McBride's job.

vnunet.com