McBride at SCOForum - Let's See if Linux Stays Free

by Pamela Jones
Groklaw

August 02 2004

"In addition, he said, the company hit a home run in its goal of aggressively defending SCO's intellectual property in court. 'We've obviously overachieved on that objective,' he said. 'If I had to make this decision [to sue IBM] 10 times over, the decision would be the same one 10 times.

No doubt that explains all the motions and cross motions and all the other law suits. Are we up to ten of them yet? Or does it just feel like it? Obviously, this overachiever's having fun. He says he expects to win. And then, my pretty, we'll see what happens to your little penguin:

"SCO's fight against the alleged intellectual property infringements will have a drastic effect on Linux in the future if his company wins, he said. 'Wait until the SCO battles are over and let's see if it's free [anymore] or not.'"

You just can't help liking a guy like this, can you?

I gather he was nice enough to mention [ http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/35496.html ] Groklaw and Elvis and Rocky and The Princess Bride in the same breath. Jeff Hunsaker came onstage dressed like Elvis and Darl came out after movie clips of Rocky Balboa, but he really identifies with Wesley in the Princess Bride:

"Rather than sidestep the issue of the contentious battle against IBM, McBride referenced it often for the audience of partners and developers, even laying out the main points of the suit. 'When all of this is played out,' he said, 'the truth will prevail.'. . .

"The movie theme continued as McBride began his keynote, when he compared the SCO litigation to 'The Princess Bride.' He said he identified most strongly with the film's protagonist, Wesley, who was filled with righteous anger as a result of being wronged.

"To hammer the point home, he showed a scene from the film in which Wesley is being tortured to death, and emitting a wail of 'ultimate suffering.' McBride referenced disparaging remarks from pundits, Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds, IBM and numerous blogs. 'This has not been an easy year,' he said. 'It's been a year of ultimate suffering.'"

One can only hope. And that word truth you keep using? I don't think it means what you think it means.

VP Sandy Gupta of Declaration fame stood up to talk about their new developer program, SCO Marketplace, and I'm sure many of you will want to help SCO write code. The program "lets developers bid on development work related to SCO's Unix products". So, money is being waived in front of you. Probably no health benefits though, huh? That went out the door with the engineers they let go, I expect. I feel I should remind you that once you see that code, I think they own you forever, however, according to their theory of derivative code, so you'd be unemployable, no? Who could hire you without fear of being sued by SCO? I guess you could change professions. You couldn't donate code to GNU projects, I don't believe. So, it looks like another fine SCO business model that I'm sure will be wildly successful also. Like SCOsource.

And what about Groklaw? How does it fit into such fine company?

"Despite the amount of comments regarding its intellectual property claims, McBride attempted to show that the company was not just about recent legal actions and venomous remarks on Groklaw."

I don't think he knows what the word ultimate means either, but I do, and since last year he was portraying himself as James Bond and this year as Wesley letting out a wail of ultimate suffering, I'd say we're getting somewhere. One more indication. Last year, there was a report that attendance was "less than 1,000". This year, McBride spoke to 350.

P.S. Rocky lost.

07:37 PM EDT

Copyright 2004 http://www.groklaw.net - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/