SCO CEO vows to prevail in court fight against IBM

Computerworld - LAS VEGAS -- Darl McBride, CEO and president of The SCO Group Inc., opened the annual SCO Forum conference here today with two key messages -- Unix will not die, and SCO will eventually win its case against IBM.
McBride, who has been running the Lindon, Utah-based Unix company since 2002, told attendees at the MGM Grand hotel and casino that despite all of the criticisms SCO has received in the IT community, the legal battle continues to be the right path for his company and for the software industry.
McBride remained defiant despite continuing industry criticism and attacks against his company since it filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM in March 2003.
"I may be wrong on this point, but I doubt it," McBride said, quoting the outspoken former NBA star Charles Barkley.
McBride said he's constantly annoyed by critics who claim that SCO has moved from being an operating system vendor to becoming an intellectual property licensing company. "When people say SCO [is] just a litigation company, it really bugs me," he said.
To prove his point that SCO is back on a path of product growth after years of sitting on its Unix laurels, he said that the company has made substantial progress on the goals it set at last year's SCO Forum. The company has reinvested in its operating systems, announcing new enhanced versions today of UnixWare 7.1.4 and SCOoffice Server 4.1.
Also completed since last year was the rollout of new SCOx Web services offerings to enable legacy applications to be used on the Internet. SCO also accomplished its goal of establishing new partnerships and certifications with hardware vendors to ensure their troublefree use of SCO Unix products. The company certified 127 vendors in the first 60 days, he said.
In addition, he said, the company hit a home run in its goal of aggressively defending SCO's intellectual property in court. "We've obviously overachieved on that objective," he said. "If I had to make this decision [to sue IBM] 10 times over, the decision would be the same one 10 times.
"Big Blue is no doubt a formidable opponent, and we still expect to win," he said.
SCO continues to maintain its legal position that it owns all Unix System V source code through past purchases from Novell Inc. and others. "We're obviously battling on various fronts on that," he said.
SCO's fight against the alleged intellectual property infringements will have a drastic effect on Linux in the future if his company wins, he said. "Wait until the SCO battles are over and let's see