It was 16 years ago today on October 14, 2009, that SCO fired its CEO, Darl McBride. And it was about 13 months ago, on September 16, 2024, that McBride died at the age of 64 of complications from ALS.
His termination from SCO ended his time as the most hated man in technology. McBride architected SCO’s Business strategy of suing companies for contributing code to Linux, or even for using Linux.
Darl McBride’s business model
SCO was one of dozens of companies who licensed the operating system Unix and produced commercial products based on the original Unix code. In SCO’s case, they had been a subcontractor to Microsoft to help Microsoft produce their own version of Unix, originally called Xenix. When Microsoft decided to get out of that business, they sold the product back to SCO, who continued to market the product on its own. If you wanted to run Unix on commodity Intel based PC hardware, you bought one of SCO’s products. It was cheaper to buy a Compaq and run SCO on it than to buy a Unix workstation from Sun Microsystems.
Dozens of other companies licensed the Unix code to build operating systems for their own proprietary hardware. There were any number of reasons why someone might want to do that. Early on, the hardware reached levels of performance and/or reliability that Intel couldn’t match. Later on as Intel moved upmarket, the decision was frequently driven by software. There would be some piece of software a company needed, support was available on some number of these platforms, and they selected the one they were most comfortable with.
Linux gradually wore away at this business model. Over the course of the 1990s, proprietary Unix vendors reacted to the threat using different methods. Two of them, Silicon Graphics and IBM, decided they were better off joining them than trying to compete with free. They started contributing code and helping to mature the operating system.
SCO took a somewhat different approach. They sued IBM.
SCO v. IBM
SCO and IBM had a bit of a history. They had cooperated on a product called Project Monterey starting in 1998. In 2001, IBM had a change of heart, decided the last thing the post-Linux world really needed was yet another proprietary Unix, and changed direction.
After filing suit, SCO painted a picture of Linux as a bicycle and its own product as a sports car. And they said IBM willfully undermined SCO’s business by turning Linux into a sports car, including contributing copyrighted code.
Problem was, the code that SCO said infringed their copyrights had been previously released under an open source license or contributed into the public domain. SCO couldn’t claim ownership of it. Furthermore, it wasn’t even IBM who had contributed the code. It had been Silicon Graphics who did it.
Imagine my little and dainty but really buff 5’9, 150-lb frame accusing John Cena of something he didn’t do. And then taking a swing at him. And having an attitude about it.
It’s possible John Cena would give the yappy little runt whatever it wanted so it would go away. But it’s also safe to say a Marine turned professional wrestler has other options.
Suffice it to say, IBM didn’t pay SCO to make it go away. IBM beat SCO to within an inch of its life and let it live.
As for the Linux project, its maintainers shored up the code vetting process to prevent a repeat occurrence. So far that’s been pretty successful.
SCO v. Chrysler
The other notorious lawsuit brought about by Darl McBride’s business plan was against Chrysler. Years before, in 1988, Chrysler had purchased a Cray supercomputer, and they wanted to run Unix on it. So they purchased a license for Unix, which they presumably showed to some IT integrator, who in turn configured their Cray supercomputer for them.
Like any computer, Chrysler’s Cray had a finite useful life expectancy, and it is entirely possible that by the time SCO came calling in 2003, that Cray was sitting in somebody’s basement. Seriously, a former colleague told me he knows somebody who has a Cray super computer in his basement. It has an integrated bench, so he uses it as a couch.
In December 2003, SCO sent Chrysler a letter demanding an accounting of any and all use of Unix and Linux in the company. Chrysler never responded, so SCO sued them in March 2004.
It turned out Chrysler probably never even received the letter, because it had changed ownership and moved, and SCO mailed the letter to an office building that no longer had anything to do with Chrysler.
Linux users didn’t take kindly to this. In an era when the RIAA was suing 12-year-olds and working class mothers sharing boy-band MP3s, many of them wondered if SCO was going to turn to suing them as a business model. They couldn’t afford to put up a fight the way Chrysler or IBM could.
This business model failed to produce revenue but proved very effective at generating a great deal of ill will. In 2009, SCO had enough and fired the architect of the business model, although curiously, they continued the lawsuit with IBM. One would think they would eventually cut their losses.
Darl McBride after SCO
After SCO, McBride kept a fairly low profile. He got into the mobile app business as CEO of Shout, but largely stayed out of the public eye, which was probably the right decision. Shout was acquired by MMA Global in 2018, and McBride left the combined company in 2021, after filing for personal bankruptcy in December 2020. He then went to work at VirnetX, a Japanese holding company that appears to specialize in highly secure video conferencing.
Spinning McBride’s tenure at SCO
In a paywalled 2015 interview with the San Jose Business Journal, McBride said, “I’ve had some great wins but also some tough times. I believe the adage ‘The best form of revenge is success.’ Go after it and stay focused. If you strike out, go back to the basics and start over again.”
His LinkedIn page doesn’t try to hide his time at SCO, spinning it as a troubled company lying to its executive candidate about its financial condition and how much time he really had to turn the company around. He also claimed he didn’t know about the dispute with IBM when he started. That’s because he started the dispute, against the advice of his predecessor, Ransom Love. Love said as much in the Feb 2, 2004 issue of Businessweek.
McBride’s profile also included a diatribe about how IBM lured Linux developers into bullying him. That’s also spin. Linux developers went on the offensive against McBride because they didn’t want to get sued too, and they believed the best defense is a good offense.
His obituary spun his time at SCO defiantly: “A full-page photo of Darl commanded the cover of Fortune magazine’s May 2004 issue when he was the CEO of SCO Corporation, and considered a modern-day David at battle with business Goliaths including IBM.”
I’m familiar with the story of David and Goliath. As I recall, David won. There’s also the small matter of David being the good guy. McBride lost and wasn’t the good guy. So I don’t know anyone who considered Darl McBride a modern-day David-and-Goliath story, but maybe I just haven’t met enough people. I’m pretty introverted.
For whatever it’s worth, SCO’s predecessor company, Caldera, suing Microsoft and getting $280 million is closer to my idea of a David-and-Goliath story. But that was before Darl McBride’s time. He was working for a startup called Pointserve when that was going on. But my theory is McBride took inspiration from the Caldera suit and thought IBM would fold the way Microsoft folded for Caldera. But Microsoft was fighting antitrust battles IBM wasn’t fighting. So instead, McBride learned why Gary Kildall feared IBM.
Darl McBride’s death
Darl McBride died September 16, 2024 of complications from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS is a terrible way to go, so I hope McBride somehow found peace.
It took a few years, but McBride went from being the most hated man in tech to mostly forgotten. I didn’t see any mention of his death on any of the tech news sites when it happened. Closer to 2009, it would have been big news.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Came across your blog looking for a way to purge those pesky non keyboard characters from notepad++ text and stuck around to read your 3dfx and Darl McBride stories – both of which I remember from ages ago because I’m oooold. 🙂 I really enjoyed both posts!