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Our Blogs Open Sauce Darl McBride, where are you?
Our Blogs Open Sauce Darl McBride, where are you? | Darl McBride, where are you? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Monday, 13 August 2007 | |
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Hence I thought it would be good to recall some of the famous sayings from three of the main cheerleaders - SCO chief executive Darl McBRide, SCO public relations manager Blake Stowell and Yankee Group technology analyst Laura DiDio. I covered the case from the time it began - for another technology publication - but after a year or two I lost interest because of the way it just kept dragging along. I never had any contact with McBride but do recall some of his quotes. Here's one from an open letter of December 2003 - it's still archived on the SCO site: " SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws." SCO itself sold a Linux distribution - and I have a boxed set, one of the last copies which was sent to technology journalists for review before SCO started its legal action. After the case was filed, I decided that it would not be the right thing to do the review and informed SCO about it. (Some other worthies, notably Linux Journal, went ahead with a review, and issued a mea culpa that they had been unable to pull the review due to publication deadlines! As someone who's been managing deadlines of the craziest kind for 28 years, one can only laugh cynically at such excuses.) And which licence was this distribution sold under? The GPLv2, no less. So the company was acting against the US constitution while McBride was in charge. Or so it would seem going by his own words. Score one for Darl. I had some exchanges with Stowell, after I wrote a piece on August 29, 2003, quoting a company spokesperson as saying that SCO "had never planned to sue any Linux companies, had no concrete plans to sue anyone and also no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court." I sent the questions to SCO through their operation in Sydney. This was exactly the opposite of what McBride had said nine days earlier so Stowell wrote to me offering a clarification. However, I have long been wise to the wiles of PR people who put both feet in their mouths and then try to save their own skin. Many other statements from the company were at variance with facts and it made SCO look quite confused. I had sent a number of questions to Stowell, providing the right context and not leaving any room for ambiguity, so I told him that he could issue a clarification if he was willing to admit that he had made an error. Stowell was unwilling to do this so he never got any air from me on that score. And, last but not least, DiDio. I interviewed her as she was the most vociferous among the various "analysts" who were trying to become the equivalent of the Bible on the SCO case. The interview says a lot but you, gentle reader, can savour that at length. Here's one of her gems from a different source: "The SCO Group lawsuit against IBM for copyright infringement of the UNIX System V source code is not going away." And one more: "There are strong indications that the industry at large takes SCO’s claims seriously." Both are from a piece written by her for the Ziff Davis group on July 28, 2003. Where have these people been hiding since the afternoon of Friday, August 10 (US time) when the SCO case effectively became legless? I was late to write about it - and I did so on Sunday, August 12 (August 11 US time) but even that was tardy on my part and I blame my own laziness in large part for it. Several people had already put their stories out on the web; Pamela Jones of Groklaw had a text version of the judgement out and Steven J. Vaughan-Nicholls had written two pieces. But where is McBride? Where is Stowell? Ahoy, where are you DiDio? Now is the time for some scintillating analysis, don't you think? Is there no-one around when the ship is sinking?
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