SCO Group chief executive officer Darl McBride
has enlisted the help of the World Intellectual Property
Organisation (WIPO) to bolster his arguments against the
open-source GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and Linux during a
keynote address at the cdExpo conference in Las Vegas.
McBride said that the value of the worldwide software market
would approach $229bn by 2007, according to WIPO data, and that it
was being threatened by the ideas behind the Free Software
Foundation's GPL, the software licence governing Linux.
"The world, especially here in America, is shifting to one that
is an information society ... In the future, is that $229bn in
software still going to be there? Or, in the case of the Free
Software Foundation's goal, is proprietary software going to go
away?"
Attendees were handed a WIPO primer on intellectual property law
entitled "Intellectual Property: A Power Tool for Economic Growth".
The pamphlet had been shipped to SCO by WIPO free of charge.
McBride likened the notion of free software to a variety of
movements, including file sharing, the dotcom bubble, and even free
love. He predicted that the proprietary and open-source worlds were
on a "collision course" that would ultimately result in the end of
the GPL licence.
IBM was to blame for the threat to the GPL because it had raised
the issue of GPL violations in an August lawsuit against SCO,
McBride claimed. That suit was filed in response to a lawsuit filed
by SCO against IBM in March that claimed IBM's contributions to the
Linux operating system violated IBM's Unix licence.
"There is no doubt that the GPL is at risk right now, but let's
all keep in mind the history of this. We are not the ones who put
it there. That came from IBM," he added.
SCO also announced that it expected to take a charge of almost
$9m during its fourth quarter, which ended on 31 October, for legal
costs related to its Linux litigation. The money will be used to
pay legal costs relating to a new lawsuit that will be brought
against a Linux user within the next 90 days.
McBride also took time during his keynote to defend his
management, saying that he had cut SCO's quarterly losses and
restored the company's value from a low of $6m to its current value
of more than $200m, despite intense pressure from both the computer
industry and Linux users.
He said that before SCO's $3bn lawsuit with IBM, he had been
warned that "if we started talking about IP infringements inside of
Linux, the company would be crucified by the Linux community".
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service