Wired on McBride

leifbk writes "Wired has a very interesting feature article on how Darl McBride and his sidekick Mike Anderer rose to fame. Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'" A very thorough retelling of the legend that is SCO.

Still misses the point about Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There *is* very good documentation on where the code has come from -- despite what the article says.

Sheesh.

At least this is better than your average mainstream coverage.

Been theree, read that...

[Eggplant62]

This story was featured by Pamela Jones on the Groklaw site here [groklaw.net].

It's a wonderful story, and lends a *METRIC ASSLOAD* of information that gets inside why The SCO Group decided to change uniforms and start playing for the wrong team in the middle of the game. Darl's just a litigious sonofabitch who happened to find another litigious sonofabitch to help dream up this scheme whereby we try to make money off *everyone else's* ideas.

Wow...

[XeRXeS-TCN]

A very interesting article overall, showing that Darl was involved in many other situations before SCO where he was involved in trying to make revenue by nothing but IP violation claims and other lawsuits. It tends to focus on a lot of the linux stuff (obviously) but I find the earlier history much more interesting.

In 1998, Ikon fired McBride (and as late as 2001 was still writing off his acquisitions). McBride turned around and sued his former employer for $10 million, claiming breach of contract, nonpayment of wages, and fraud. It was the first instance of McBride using lawsuits to hack through a thicket of business problems.

From these "humble beginnings" to intentionally thinking up ideas to patent, simply to take people to court over infringement, we can see that clearly he was the best man to pull SCO's slumping sales up with the last-resort tactic of trying to enforce some concocted IP violations. Only this time, he appears to have bitten off more than he can chew.

with legal fees mounting in his battle with Ikon, he faced bankruptcy. McBride eventually dropped his lawsuit, and, as part of the settlement, walked away from his startup.

I'm thinking there's a very good chance we'll see history repeat itself. ;)

The Linux Show

[coolfrood]

The Linux Show [thelinuxshow.com] had an interesting feature [thelinuxshow.com] this week about SCO and the Linux editor, Steve Vaughan from Eweek [eweek.com] presented his view of Darl McBride after having met him multiple times since the whole SCO issue started. According to him, Darl McBride is an achiever, and if you can, for a second, believe in what he's doing, like he does, you will make amazed at his dedication. According to him, McBride will not give up until the last vestiges of SCO are thrown out of court. He will accept anything other than a defeat in the court. It is an interesting show to listen to, give it a shot

More Information...

[NEOtaku17]

On Darl McBride [wikipedia.org], SCO [wikipedia.org], and the SCO vs. IBM [wikipedia.org] lawsuit.

Re:Competetive?

[njdj]

Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes.
In the so-called "robber baron" era of raw, unfettered capitalism, the late 19th century, when people like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller amassed huge fortunes, a CEO typically was paid about 40 times as much as the median employee. (It makes more sense to use the median as the benchmark instead of the lowest-paid because it's a more stable number).
A CEO who pays himself more than 40 times the median salary at his company is basically stealing. I see no problem with a law which says that "compensation" in excess of 40x the median salary is prima facie evidence of theft. Mr Grasso comes to mind.
Of course, a CEO could rebut the presumption of theft by showing that he had increased company profits commensurately with his salary. But, studies seem to show that a company's change in profitability is not significantly correlated with the CEO's salary.

Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't

[pyrrhonist]

How is linux not well documented?
There are a zillion books in the book stores, there are a zillion howto's on the web, there is documentation on all the download pages.

Not that kind of documentation, you big freak!

In this case, "not well documented", refers to the record of where the source code came from and who originally wrote it.

Re:He Might Be Passe, But What He Is Doing Isn't

[nathanh]

Given the the codebase of all their products I think it's pretty much inevitable that there is some GPLed code somewhere in there. Lucky for them not too many people see the code and those that do probably don't know the linux codebase.

Maybe one day somebody will actually find which part of windows contains GPLed code and all hell will break loose. I would not want to be a MS shareholder on that day.

Similar GPL situations have already happened with NEXT whose NEXTSTEP now forms the core of MacOS X, and also with Linksys who is now owned by Cisco. I think this suggests that the most likely way Microsoft will be "caught out" by the GPL will be through a purchase of a smaller company.

I have very little doubt that there are already Microsoft products with inadvertant GPL code (and I'm not talking about their known GPL usages like SFU). But history shows that many GPL owners consider removal of the code as acceptable, and the FSF says they resolve a dozen cases per year in this discrete way. So I don't think a GPL situation will be "hell" for Microsoft.

Caldera OpenLinux

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't Debian or RedHat based. COL was prety much it's own distro. It used RPMs, and Caldera was a partner in developing the RPM.

It had a lot going for it. However, it chose to use older versions of programs for stability sake (kindof like the STABLE branch of FreeBSD). It made it hard to upgrade some things manually. Security patches were patches to those OLD versions of the programs.

After McBride took over, Caldera started getting really sloppy about releasing patches. I had to manually patch several critical holes because they wouldn't release patches for 3-4 weeks (if they released them at all).