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Readers respond: SCO's McBride doesn't speak for IT in IBM fight
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August 15, 2003 (Computerworld) -- Yesterday, Darl McBride, CEO and president of The SCO Group Inc., said in a conference call with financial analysts and reporters that he believes "the silent majority [in the IT world] is actually behind SCO" in its legal fight against IBM over its intellectual property rights (see story).
More than a dozen vocal Computerworld readers, however, disagreed with McBride's assessment, according to a series of e-mails received today from IT workers who universally said McBride doesn't speak for them.
"Just to let you know that I and my organization, until now a part of the silent majority, do not support SCO," wrote Craig Olson, security manager at AgriBank FCB, a wholesale lender for Farm Credit Services Associations, in St. Paul, Minn. "I believe that the open source movement is the most impactful industry event since Java and is the only way of saving the industry from the Microsoft death spiral."
Jeffrey Nicholas, a systems architect at a major New York-based financial services company, said McBride's comments are wishful thinking.
"I believe that it's one of those classic political moves where he's hoping that it will become true, where if he says it enough times then maybe people will believe it," Nicholas said today in an interview. "I don't think that's going to happen."
While Nicholas' company is not a major user of Linux, it is firmly in the open-source camp, he said, because open-source allows the business to control its own needs and IT infrastructure.
A representative for a major computer peripheral manufacturer, who asked that his name and company's name be withheld, said in an e-mail that McBride is wrong about the "silent majority."
"I, for one, don't believe him," the reader said. "The IT folks I work with here think McBride's nothing more than an opportunist and a greedy one at that. His statement that he has tons of support doesn't hold water. No one wants to have their systems held for ransom by the rough equivalent of a pirate."
In an interview, the reader said: "SCO has been a third-tier player for so long, this is their one bid for glory. Because if this doesn't work, what's left for them?"
In March, SCO filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM alleging that IBM illegally put some of SCO's protected Unix source code into the open-source Linux project. The lawsuit was later amended to include additional claims and now seeks at least $3 billion. Last week, SCO announced that it would sell special Unix licenses for $699 per processor to allow enterprise Linux users to use Linux legally without violating SCO's alleged intellectual property.
Many corporate Linux users, meanwhile, are waiting to decide whether to pay the licensing fees, since no court has yet ruled on SCO's claims. SCO has publicly warned companies using Linux that they could become legal targets.
Mike Lareau, a federal IT employee in Washington, wrote: "I would NEVER back anybody who wanted to charge me money for anything" before it's proven in court. "I ... resent the fact that it is being applied to me as a member of the 'IT world.'"
"You would have a hard time convincing me that anybody who's concerned about the bottom line of their company is going to be willing to throw money into something with no return on investment at all, other than a promise that they're not going to get sued" later, he said today. "We don't even know if their suit against [IBM] has any merit."
Joey Mele, president of JBT Production Services, a small consulting company in Las Vegas, wrote that McBride is off-base in claiming that the silent majority of the IT world is behind him.
"I just couldn't believe the guy could say something like that," Mele said in an interview. "It's so detached from reality."
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