(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Once Linux’s Biggest Enemy: Darl McBride Dies and Nobody Notices

2024-11-02 17:43:05+00:00

Once Linux’s Biggest Enemy: Darl McBride Dies and Nobody Notices

The man who, as president and CEO of SCO, attempted to sue Linux out of existence died a month and a half ago with little notice by the Linux and open source communities.

Darl McBride died a month and a half ago and nobody in the Linux world seems to have noticed. I’m flabbergasted. I would never have thought it possible that a guy who dominated Linux news coverage from 2003 until 2007 — and whose actions at first scared the bejesus out of us whether we’d admit it or not — could be dead and buried for something like forever (in news cycle terms, at least) without coverage from the FOSS press.

McBride, who back in the early aughts was CEO of Utah-based SCO, is famous for trying to bring an end to Linux as we know it by taking on IBM, Daimler Chrysler, Novell, and many other corporations, in legal battles with the claim that Linux was filled with code that had been purloined from SCO’s proprietary versions of Unix.

Today I found out, from a short blurb that Techrights published on October 31, that McBride’s been dead since September 16. Techrights updated its notice this morning to include a copy-and-paste of a post, also made today, from the people-powered news aggregator site SoylentNews by a user with the handle Frosty Piss:

“It’s been a month and a half since Darl McBride kicked the bucket (who?), and nary a mention in the press. But then, perhaps most Linux followers today were not alive or old enough to have experienced Mr. McBride’s assault on Linux that could have very well ended its life as open source. Of course I’m talking about way back in the stone age when SCO sued IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others for ownership of the Linux kernel. Those of us who were around followed the now defunct Groklaw for the latest dirt on this legal entanglement that is now for the most part forgotten.”

McBride Takes on Linux

The poster must’ve gotten the news from Wikipedia, because the post includes three paragraphs from McBride’s Wikipedia bio that includes a quote from former Novell EVP and McBride co-worker, Ty Mattingly, telling McBride, “Congratulations. In a few short months you’ve dethroned Bill Gates as the most hated man in the industry.”

What Mattingly said was close to true. For a short time he was perhaps the most hated person on the planet… at least, in Linux and open source circles. He claimed at the time that he’d received death threats, which was undoubtedly factual.

It appears that he returned the favor however, when he announced that SCO was investigating the writer who was most closely covering the legal brouhaha between Linux and SCO, which was PJ, the pen name used to protect the identity of the writer publishing the blog Groklaw.

Two weeks after the announcement, FOSS writer Maureen O’Gara, evidently working in cahoots with SCO, published an article in Linux Business News that identified PJ as Pamela Jones, and which contained unverified personal information about her, including a photo that was said to be of her home. Also published were the addresses and telephone numbers that purportedly belonged to Jones and her mother.

The Case That Wasn’t There

SCO’s threats against Linux quickly turned out to be without teeth. When McBride and his team at SCO revealed some snippets of code from Linux that it claimed were copies of its proprietary Unix code, some Linux researchers went to work and quickly discovered that the code in question was actually BSD code covered under the permissive BSD license, meaning that SCO was free to use it as part of its proprietary platform, and Linux was free to use it under its open source GPL platform.

That wasn’t enough to close the matter however, and SCO continued to push its case for several more years, until Novell, which had originally owned the SCO code, was able to get a court to rule that when it’d sold the code to SCO it had retained the copyright, which meant that SCO no longer had any standing in the case.

Even then the case wasn’t completely finished. As recently as 2017, long after McBride left the company, and even after SCO had all but ceased to exist as a functioning entity, the case was briefly revived, only to be slapped down again.

After leaving SCO, McBride took some software that he bought from SCO in a bankruptcy sale and started a company called Shout, which marketed an engagement platform. Then in 2021 he took a job as chief operating officer at Japan-based VirnetX, which markets a secure digital communications platform. According to his obituary, McBride passed away on September 16, 2024 after a battle with ALS. He was 64.

In case you’re worried, McBride was far from friendless at the end. In researching this article I found a nice “goodbye” piece on the website Utah Money Watch by writer David Politis who was a close personal friend of McBride.
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[1] URL: https://fossforce.com/2024/11/once-linuxs-biggest-enemy-darl-mcbride-dies-and-nobody-notices/
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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