What if it's not a "pump and dump" stock scam? What if McBride and his cohorts went into this believing that they had a reasonable case? Here are all these lines of identical code, and these lawyers and finance-types have no clue how that might have happened. They don't know anything about the history of this business. So to them the conclusion is obvious — somebody stole our stuff. They are so sure of it that they prepared some slides for their annual business-partner show in Las Vegas. "Here, gentlemen, is the smoking gun." So some German reporter surreptituously takes a few photographs of the slides, and the next thing McBride knows his "smoking gun" is plastered all over the Internet. Within minutes, a million people who hate his guts go to work on finding out where this stuff came from. Sure enough, just as a whole bunch of people predicted at the very beginning, the SCO 'suits' are looking at old BSD code and they don't even know what that means. No wonder the Engineering VP sold all his stock and resigned. In the meantime, Mr. McBride — who thinks he has a case — has conducted himself in ways that not only make intellectual property lawyers cringe, but subject his company and possibly himself to huge penalties and sanctions. McBride has gotten on stage numerous times now to tell the world that IBM no longer has the right to sell AIX. He has threatened IBM's AIX customers with audits and possible lawsuits. If it turns out now that he is an ignorant 'suit' braying like an ass in Geekland, he and SCO are not just finished, they will be cratered. SCO does not have enough money to pay for the damage they have done to IBM and its business. Red Hat alone could probably clean out the SCO wallet after all the bad-mouthing that SCO spokespersons have done to linux. IBM will want McBride's head on a stick, whatever remains of Ray Noorda's fortune, and the UNIX IP as the cherry on top. |
In a matter of hours, the topic among those following this case has changed from whether SCO has any cattle to go along with its big hat, to whether we are watching a bunch of arrogant lawyers and non-technical 'suits' walk into a buzz-saw of their own design.