SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks

InfoWorld ^ | 21 August 2003 | Robert McMillan

[steve-b]

IBM Corp. has been quietly stage-managing the open source community's response to The SCO Group Inc.'s $3 billion lawsuit over Big Blue's contributions to the Linux source code, SCO's Chief Executive Officer Darl McBride said in an interview at his company's SCO Forum user conference in Las Vegas this week.

"We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM," McBride said....

McBride declined to reveal the sources of his allegations, but he claimed that IBM was involved in Novell's and Red Hat's responses to SCO's lawsuit. "Even though IBM looks like they're not really involved in it, they're very involved," he said. "From a PR standpoint, they're able to extract themselves from (the dispute), and so they throw Red Hat at us, they throw Novell at us, they have (Open Source Initiative President) Eric Raymond on their payroll. They have all these guys that they fund and then they just step back and watch the fracas go on."...

[steve-b]

they [IBM] have (Open Source Initiative President) Eric Raymond on their payroll

Yeah, and I'll be Eric Raymond is the one who stole his strawberries.

[Hodar]

Stole his strawberries? Darn that man ... I'll bet he owes me money.

[BushCountry]

You play with the big boys, you better be ready to play ball!

[HiTech RedNeck]

Whine on, whine on Darly boy... for me and my Penguin.
Whine on, whine on Darly boy... for me and my Tux.

[steve-b]

Your suggestion that McBride & Co. actually thought they had a case based on their brain-dead search match between their code and Linux code is starting to make more and more sense. McBride certainly sounds like somebody who has just realized that the doodoo is at armpit level and rising, and hasn't the slightest idea what to do about it.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I know what McBride can do. GPL System V and flee to Argentina.

[Salgak]

Ah, but does McBride constantly twiddle a pair of ball-bearings. And will he prove his case with geometric logic ???

[dighton]

Captain Queeg bump.

[adam_az]

"Even though IBM looks like they're not really involved in it, they're very involved,"

Maybe because YOU ARE SUING THEM? What a shock!

[Nick Danger]

McBride certainly sounds like somebody who has just realized that the doodoo is at armpit level and rising, and hasn't the slightest idea what to do about it.

Some of the stuff McBride has said in the past is wild, but it was understandable as the act of a guy with brass balls trying to bluff the world. The statement in this article makes him look nuts.

As Eric Raymond said in his open letter to McBride, "To a manipulator, all behaviors are manipulation. To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy." We on FR have witnessed this for years in the behavior of the louder Democrats. To Hillary Clinton, all opposition to her wonderful ideas comes from a "vast, right-wing conspiracy."

Plenty of people think they see the hidden hand of Microsoft, or Sun, or maybe both, behind these incredibly self-destructive behaviors by SCO. Maybe there's something to it.

He is indeed in some deep doo-doo. If his lawyers can't persuade a judge that those Novell letters prohibiting the AIX cancellation are somehow invalid, SCO is on the hook for some serious trade libel. That company doesn't have enough money to pay the damages on just that one charge.

As for all these code snippets, the journalists are sufficiently ignorant that they don't know what to believe, so they're presenting this controversy as if it's "open source advocates say this" versus "but SCO says that," as though no one can tell who is right. But out in the real world, there are very few IT managers who do not recognize malloc.c as something they first encountered twenty years ago. They don't need Bruce Perens or Eric Raymond to tell them that SCO's "smoking gun" is so much crap. They know this themselves, from personal knowledge.

Anyone who was considering covering their bets by buying these "licenses" from SCO just saw something that is going to make them hold back until they see something that doesn't look like a joke. So far, SCO's "evidence" suggests that something really stupid and embarrassing is underway. Better to get some popcorn and watch some more, certainly before sending them any money.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Alread posted

[justlurking]

No, that was my duplicate posting. It has been deleted.

[justlurking]

Another interesting article: SCO's attorney makes a bunch of barely coherent claims:

http://news.com.com/2008-1082-5066520.html

[Liberal Classic]

Don't you ever check the title you sluggard?

_(sarcasm)

[RinaseaofDs]

We have a Proxy War!

MS through SCO vs. Linux through IBM.

Just like Viet-fricken-Nam baby!

Penguins in the wire, we got penguins in the wire!

[TechJunkYard]

"We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM," McBride said....

McBride declined to reveal the sources of his allegations..

Hallucinations of a very desperate man.

[justlurking]

Oh well. You have to give him credit for the effort.

I posted a duplicate in the same forum! I hadn't seen it, but got distracted while I was composing the posting and someone else posted it first.

I requested the deletion.

[Liberal Classic]

I think it's kind of funny that an excerpt was interpreted tobe an attempt to draw it out of context.

[new cruelty]

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks. WTF. TGIF. TTFN.