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Q&A: SCO's McBride on his open letter to the Linux community
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September 11, 2003 (Computerworld) -- On Tuesday, Darl McBride, CEO and president of Unix vendor The SCO Group Inc., released an open letter offering to talk about the issues separating his company and the open-source and Linux communities. In an interview with Computerworld yesterday, McBride explained why he wrote the letter and what he expects to accomplish.
For months now, SCO has claimed that IBM illegally contributed some of SCO's protected Unix System V code to the Linux project, and has warned companies using Linux since the release of Version 2.4 of the Linux kernel that they have to pay SCO a licensing fee. Critics argue that SCO is just trying to make a last-ditch effort to stay alive through the courts and a hoped-for payoff from IBM.
Here's what McBride had to say:
When you wrote the letter, did you envision it as a a peace offering to the open-source community or is that too strong an image? Yes, it is an olive branch. We want to understand how we can move forward together here. Both sides are entrenched in their positions. This could be a 15-year knockdown, drag-out type of fight. At another level, if there's a way of resolving the differences so we move along peacefully in a shorter term that gets resolved, we're all for that.
What is your best possible scenario to come out of the letter? It would be to have our intellectual property [IP] that we feel has been misappropriated into Linux getting valued, and we're then able to move forward. We're recognizing the clout that Linux is developing, the fact that it's a worldwide phenomenon and the fact that this can really be a new standard for computing in the business environment. To the extent that we're able to get recognition for what we feel is a significant amount of contribution ... we move forward together, and Linux is able to live and we're able to get recognition for our IP.
Why did you send the letter? The letter was spurred on in large part by the distributed denial-of-service attacks we've been receiving [at SCO's Web site] over the last few weeks. We have gotten a handle on the attacks, we've taken defensive measures. It really started me thinking about what is going on here at the "big picture" level. We have a court date set with IBM for April 11, 2005. Is this going to be our collective lives for the next couple of years, attack and counterattack, back and forth? Sometimes when you get in the battlefield you have to step back once in a while and say, "Where are we and what's going on?" That's what spurred it.
What we're trying to say is, No.1, intellectual property is very important in establishing this [Linux] platform and to just take this "don't ask, don't tell" methodology [toward IP], we don't think that works. If we're going into a new business environment around Linux, well, let's ask the question right upfront: Does the free business model work? Everything we've looked at, whether it's free Internet, free telecom, free music, all of these things tend to, for one reason or another, not work over an extended period of time. Clearly, the free model just about killed our company, and I would argue that it's going to kill a lot of other software companies if the GPL [General Public License] is able to gain a foothold and run rampant throughout the industry.
Is this letter setting a more conciliatory tone than you've had in the recent past toward the open-source community? I believe it kind of was [more conciliatory].
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