The Linux Killer
Last February, Darl McBride received a Federal Express package at his home in Salt Lake City with a sticker proclaiming in big, bold letters: live worms.
Understandably cautious, McBride's wife brought it into the garage. When her husband discovered that there were, in fact, worms wriggling inside the cardboard box, he threw it away.
It was just another indignity for the chief executive of the widely unpopular SCO Group. McBride has also received death threats, a challenge to a fistfight, and a flood of denial-of-service attacks targeting his company's email servers and his home phone. He's started carrying a gun for protection. Friends tease him that in two short years, he has displaced Bill Gates as the most hated man in high tech.
It took Gates decades of hard work to achieve that distinction.
What has the son of a farmer, a devout Mormon, and the father of seven done to so swiftly earn the honor? McBride has transformed SCO into a legal missile aimed at the heart of the open source software movement. His strategy threatens to undo the progress of Linux and other free operating systems developed by programmers who believe that collaborative efforts have produced the most robust and reliable code.
SCO claims it owns the intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system and that contributors to Linux have pilfered that code. It further asserts that IBM in particular has illegally diverted the SCO family jewels into the Linux system. Every Linux user, SCO concludes, owes it money. To press these allegations - and scare the stuffing out of Linux users - SCO brought out the heavy artillery: Early last year, McBride hired famed litigator David Boies, who led the federal government's antitrust case against Microsoft and represented Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election recount.
