CRN Interview: Darl McBride & Chris Sontag, SCO Group

SCO Group CEO Darl McBride and Senior Vice President Chris Sontag recently met with Industry Editor Barbara Darrow to discuss a variety of topics related to SCO's suit against IBM and an unnamed Enterprise Linux User. The SCO-IBM case IS slated to hit a Utah courtroom in 18 months. Earlier this month, a Utah judge ruled that SCO must show the code at issue in this case within 30 days. Open-source advocates have maintained thet SCO has no case. SCO says IBM violated its contract.

CRN: Can suing customers, as you've said you will, be good for any vendor?

DARL MCBRIDE: First, it's not our customers. I would say we're suing end users. We are going after end users of Linux and I think there's a slight but significant difference there.

CRN: When you talk to your VARs, partners, integrators %85 what are they saying about this legal battle? Is it confusing their market?

MCBRIDE: It's a range. Those who are directly selling SCO Unix products are cheering us on, saying go, fight, win. Those who have drifted over to the Linux camp are confused. It depends on where they are in the process.

CRN: Are you trying to evangelize them to speak out on your behalf?

MCBRIDE: My first reaction was we needed to create a counterbalance [to the vocal open sourcers]. We're on the side of the silent majority ... but at the end of the day it's around who's right. We're rock-solid on our claims.

CRN: Conspiracy theorists say you guys are acting as Microsoft's pawn against open source and the General Public License [GPL]. Can you comment?

MCBRIDE: The funny part is we didn't even talk to Microsoft about this %85 funny, when I talked to IBM earlier this year, before we did anything, it wasn't even clear ... where the IP problems were. We just said we were going to start investigating IP issues, and IBM said, 'You're just giving Bill Gates an early Christmas present.' Bill Gates? This is about our IP!

CRN: So is the IBM case becoming a test of the GPL?

MCBRIDE: Early on we looked at GPL-related issues and felt it was an Achilles heel for IBM, but we didn't open them up initially. We didn't want to confuse a clear-cut contract issue [with IBM] with the untested GPL and other issues. But when IBM dragged GPL onto the table, our lawyers started sharpening their steak knives. 'OK, if that's what you want to talk about, we'll talk about it.'

IBM will have a lot of problems trying to hide behind the GPL. Basically the GPL is countering U.S. Copyright law.

CRN: Oracle, IBM and other software vendors say they're bleeding the cost out of the operating systems with Linux and hardware with standard, commodity gear, but they're not cutting the price of their own software.

MCBRIDE: That's the whole point. ... It's a weird thing and what it is really is business competition. Underneath all this is hard-core capitalism. They're trying to drive us out of business and we're fighting back. The good news is we have the U.S. Copyright Office on our side to fight with.

CRN: I believe Hewlett-Packard is the only vendor who's talked about indemnifying customers. If you guys sue an HP customer, what happens?

CHRIS SONTAG: Well, HP put a lot of provisos in place [to qualify for indemnification]. You have to be an HP customer on HP hardware. You have to have a support agreement with HP, which very few of their customers have. And you can't modify the code.

CRN: Have you identified exactly what code is at issue here?

SONTAG: We've identified a lot of different things. Early on when we filed against IBM, people wanted us to show the code. Even though we're fighting a legal case and [a courtroom] is where it's appropriately vetted, we decide to take at least one example and show it. We had to do so under NDAs [nondisclosure agreements], because if you're comparing our System V code, it is not released without confidentiality agreements.

If you signed an NDA, journalists, analysts and customers have seen the example we showed. A substantial amount was a cut-and-paste job, a few lines changed, but a substantial body of code. You don't have to be a programmer at all to see copying has occurred. It wasn't just 10 lines of code,that example was over 80 to 100 lines of code. Later, some of the Linux people said that code shouldn't have been there. [Open-source advocate] Bruce Perens said it was a development problem and 'we've taken it out.' My analogy is [that's] like a bank robber with posse in pursuit swinging back by the bank and throwing the money back in.

CRN: Why in the world would anyone take on IBM, which probably has more legal resources than any other company?

MCBRIDE: This is a David-and-Goliath battle. The might and sheer size of IBM against the legal stone that we have, and it just so happens we have a very good legal stone, and we have a guy named David [attorney David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner] carrying the slingshot. So we like our chances. David used to be with [Cravath, Swaine & Moore, IBM's law firm]. The guy at Cravath supporting IBM used to work for David. So you've now got that sub-plot of the Grasshopper-and-Master thing.