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SCO On The Stand

There are times when the jokes just seem to tell themselves.  Yesterday, during testimony for Novell's lawsuit against SCO to determine how much Novell was owed for its ownership of the Unix copyrights, none other than Darl McBride took the stand and said two things that will no doubt become fodder for .SIG files from here to eternity.

When you go to the bookstore and look in the Unix section, there's books on "How to Program Unix" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist. ... Linux is a copy of Unix, there is no difference.

A five-second search on Amazon.com disproved the first statement, and the second ... well, if McBride still believes that in the face of everything he's been shown, then I suspect it's simply a point of dogma for him and not something that can be countered with facts.

There's a great deal more, most of it revolving around McBride saying things that were blatantly contradicted by other testimony which he didn't hear.  ArsTechnica has a good rundown of the whole thing, including additional context.

I have never been less than stupefied whenever I've read any of the developments regarding SCO and its leadership.  It's impossible for me to believe that they can continue to be so willfully ignorant of how open source works.  My guess is that they simply never cared, and that they were banking on the still-tentative feelings many people had about open source back in '03.  Word the threats the right way, and maybe you can scare everyone else away from Linux and recorner a market you've lost.

Fortunately, the right people were not that naive.  And now we're at a point where scaring people away from open source on wholly spurious grounds is so passe that even Microsoft is leaving it behind.

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