v nunet.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 kernelis 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 IBMis Unix license from SCO. The company has asked for US$3 billion in damages, and has pulled IBMis license to distribute AIX, Big Blueis version of Unix. For its part, IBM denies the entire thing, and has said that its license for Unix doesnit 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. [Editoris Note: Our story originally stated that IBM owns Novell, a mistake which Novellis 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 SCOis CEO sees his companyis strategy. From vnunet.com:
How, in practice, could IBM return all copies of AIX?
I suppose the simple requirement is ito return or destroyi. We havenit 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.comis Web site. There are three parts, with links at the bottom of the article to pages 1 and 2.