As such, the company approached Boies to deal with the matter as "we wanted to find a guy who was used to dealing with complicated legal issues," McBride said.-- Darl McBride, 2003-01-22

McBride also confirmed that the company has hired high-profile attorney David Boies and his legal firm to investigate whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and versions of BSD infringed on the Unix intellectual property it owned.

While claiming that it is hard to estimate how many people are technically in breach of its licensing terms, McBride said it's "very widespread and would generate a revenue stream in the millions of dollars. We know who they are."

But he stressed that this is a "friendly move" by the company....-- Darl McBride, 2003-01-22

Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, told eWEEK in an interview that he was fairly certain that if it involved proprietary Unix technology, Red Hat had no concern. "But every time people get engaged in unproductive arguments, it slows things down.

"What the IT industry needs today is a direction forward and as long as we're fighting these border skirmishes about this library and that thing there, is it Lindows, is it Windows, that's a distraction," he said.-- Michael Tiemann, 2003-01-22