S CO is a name most users and providers of Linux have come to hate. SCOis leader, Darl McBride, is the personification of evil to the supporters of Open Source.
Why?
Because SCO believes it owns much of what makes up the core of Linux, the Open Source OS developed by Linus Torvalds, and the company has been aggressively demanding that anyone who is providing or using Linux to pay. To that end, SCO has a slew of lawsuits in the courts, and it believes it will win them.
While you may understand what SCO is attempting with its litigation, you may not know why. Wired News has posted an in-depth look at SCO, CEO Darl McBride, and the reasonings and causes behind SCOis beliefs and actions. Hereis an excerpt from the article, The Linux Killer:Sitting in a conference room at SCO headquarters, flanked by two walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves containing thousands of freshly bindered Unix licensing contracts, McBride says that all the noise suggests his team is about to score an upset victory. "The yelling gets the loudest when youire near the end zone," he says, banking a metaphor off years of devotion to the Oakland Raiders. "Weire in their stadium, and itis as noisy as it can get. But we think the crowd is going to get very quiet when we put some points on the board."
Stocky and thick around the waist, his dark hair graying at the temples, Darl McBride doesnit seem like a bomb-throwing, high tech counterrevolutionary. He speaks imprecisely and haltingly about issues like constitutional law and the GNU General Public License, which governs the distribution of Linux. But McBride is certain that heis right, even if many legal analysts say the factual reed on which SCO bases its claim is thin. He believes heis on the just side of a historic struggle that has significance beyond todayis headlines.
"It seems to me that the battle isnit really SCO versus IBM, or SCO versus Linux," McBride says. "I think thereis a war going on. The war is around the future of the operating system, and whether itis going to be free or not."
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There may indeed be a holy war raging, but SCO joined it out of desperation, not in deference to a higher calling. The very day that McBride took the job as CEO in 2002, the company, then a friendly Linux reseller known as Caldera Systems, received a delisting notice from Nasdaq - despite having done a reverse four-for-one stock split just three months before. It then spent $4 million in a stock buyback to boost the price, which left the business with less than four monthsi worth of cash in the bank. Calderais Linux operation was spending $4 for every dollar in revenue it earned. McBride faced a nearly hopeless situation. One of his first moves was to change the name of the company to the SCO Group and craft a strategy to use its ownership of Unix as a legal weapon against the Linux community.
The lengthy article (6 pages) provide a very interesting and detailed look at SCO, and is a recommended read.