SCO: No plan, no clue, no shame

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

May 29, 2003

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
-- Attorney Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, June 9, 1954

Almost 50 years have passed since that rhetorical question caused repercussions that led to the eventual downfall in disgrace of Senator McCarthy. I would ask that same question of Darl McBride, CEO of SCO. Yesterday, he threatened Linus Torvalds with a lawsuit. I would also ask him why he doesn't sue the Dalai Lama too while he's at it.

Curiously, these threats came hours after SCO released a statement that the their case wasn't about patents and wasn't about intellectual property or copyrights. I suppose Linus must have a contract with SCO or else why would they want to sue him? As Sir Walter Scott once wrote: 'Oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive'.

There would seem to be no competent member of the SCO group. The officers of SCO and members of their legal department show signs of lacking simple common sense. All this has come about because SCO has embarked on a course not knowing where it was going to lead. This is all right if you're a vagabond living out of a ruck sack, but if you're going to take on IBM, the people who put the 'blue' in 'blue chip', and then, incidentally, pick a fight with just about everybody along the way, then you'd better have more than an inkling. It is now apparent that SCO doesn't have more than this.

Case in point: Darl McBride stated on March 6, shortly after filing suit against IBM that "SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system,". It would seem they don't. Novell, who likes Linux quite a bit and more importantly, is in possession of good judgment, announced yesterday that they own the rights to key elements of UNIX known as System V. This reminds me of the scene in the film "A Few Good Men" in which the defense attorney played by Demi Moore realizes that an incident she was using to defend her client hadn't even taken place. Tom Cruise, her co-counsel, remarks: "I guess that was important, wasn't it?". I doubt SCO is going to have such a nice Hollywood ending as did Cruise and company in "A Few Good Men". To steal another quote from the film, McBride might as well go to the judge with "Unit, Corps, God, Country".

When I wrote the first in this series of op-ed pieces about SCO, I opined that nothing good would come out of this, not even for SCO. Someone remarked that SCO's stock (SCOX) had in fact risen notably since the announcement of the IBM suit and so my argument seemed to have, at the time, that little flaw in it. Yesterday, by 4:00 PM New York time, SCO stock had already lost 25 percent of its value. I write this three and a half hours after the stock market opened in New York today (May 29). We have quite some time left in the day ahead of us but it looks like that one positive light in SCOs darkening firmament will soon grow dim as well.

It's totally understandable. SCO never had a plan, doesn't have a clue and, after threatening Linus Torvalds with a lawsuit, has shown that it doesn't have any decency or shame either.

Michael J. Jordan can be reached at Michael.Jordan++AT++linux.org (please replace ++AT++ with @ - and you'll be doing your part to fight spam)