Q&A: McBride says SCO isn't dead yet, despite legal loss

Since the lawsuits were filed, you personally have been criticized and ridiculed in various blogs and publications. How do you view the comments of your critics? It's a little bit of a strange twist to the story how I've become the most hated man in the industry. I was speaking at Brigham Young University last year, and I held up the Fortune magazine that had me on the cover that said, "He's corporate enemy No. 1, and his name's Darl McBride." I said it must have been a slow year for corporate enemies.

I think this thing has been overplayed just a tad. Part of the game plan of our opposition on this was to paint me in a light that was not favorable. They've obviously done a good job at that. But when somebody takes something from me -- my father taught me growing up on the ranch that you've got to stand up and defend yourself. I don't tend to go out and pick fights on my own, but I also don't tend to back down from one when someone's coming after me.

There's a story here that we can really get this thing turned around. If you look where Apple was 10 years ago, they were on their back. They were just about down and out, and they came back. What brought them back into it was innovation, with really cool new products. That's the mantra we've had for a long time inside this company. The best form of revenge is success. We believe that over time, this whole thing about us being the pariah of the industry or trying to pick on the poor Linux guys, that's not what it's about.

If SCO is to survive despite all the challenges you face, how will that happen? I think there's an element to SCO that reaches beyond a typical company, and I think it has to do with the broader-scope community of our customers and our resellers. We just came out of our [annual] SCO Forum in Las Vegas last month, and we had one of the best forums we've ever had. The customers and the resellers were just so enthusiastic about where we are going. They're all talking about how SCO Unix is so much better than Linux, and are so supportive of what we're doing and of our legal battles. And this is the first year that they've really taken to this whole mobility story.

One of the mantras we have is that if you get knocked down seven times, you just get up eight times. Heaven knows we've been knocked down.

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