At the end of the day, our most prized asset is our ownership of the Unix OS. And that's what IBM said they'd obliterate. It's a punch in the nose. You can either take flight, or fight for what's right. But this is about misappropriation of trade secrets and contractual violations. We have 30,000 licensees of the Unix OS. We've always been very open with the source code to any institution that wanted it, whether it's a university, government or a corporation. If they turn it to commercial use, there are royalties. In our contract, it states that licensees must use their best efforts to protect our source code.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

By June 13, if there is no response from IBM, we will revoke their AIX contract so they won't have source code to use it. The judge will then make up his or her mind.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

Everyone just says we're a company going out of business, and throwing a Hail Mary pass, but once we get to court, those who say that will look as strange as the Iraqi information minister on TV saying the infidels are defeated and did not get into Baghdad.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

From what I hear, IBM will blacken the Utah sky with lawyers.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

I can't answer that right now for legal reasons. It will be discussed in court. But we're not talking about insignificant amounts of code. It's substantial System V code showing up in Linux.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

IBM walked away from Project Monterey, and they told us if we didn't like it, sue us. That took two years out of our life. IBM took chunks out of Monterey, and gave it away. You can find it in Red Hat and SuSE Linux. When IBM pulled out of Monterey, they did it concurrently with moving over to Linux. The heat has been turning up on this for some time.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

The open-source guys were cool with it. IBM wanted to keep IP issues under the rug. They said not to talk about IP. And they talked about source code libraries. They told us if we didn't retract it, IBM would stop doing business with us. IBM threatened us and told us if we didn't back off, life would be ugly.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

We approached Red Hat [about licensing source code libraries] and they thought [our claim] was interesting. They said they'd talk about it, but then called back and said we'll pass [on licensing the source code from SCO]. [Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew] Szulik said copyright issues scare him. But Red Hat has had a free ride. In its IPO filings, one of the warnings to investors stated clearly that Red Hat may be violating IP and one day they may have to step up and pay royalties. Why not? Every time I ship a copy of my operating system, I pay royalties to Novell and Veritas. There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done. But we're focused on the IBM situation.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

We're either right or we're not. If we're wrong, we deserve people throwing rocks at us. But what if SCO is right? When we go through the legal proceedings, people will see. Is there collateral damage? Yes. We had our eyes wide open when we started this. We're not blind as to what is going on around us. But we're in it for the long haul.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

Who's making money off Linux? Red Hat barely had its head above water and it's right back down again. If you look closely, a lot of the Linux distributors have gone out of business on this model. You have to ask, who is making money? And it's IBM. IBM is making money on boxes and IBM Global Services. If you're this company, don't you have an interest in the operating system being commoditized because there's more money in hardware and services? Linus Torvalds regulates the trademark and determines what goes in and out of the kernel. So who is the policing agency that checks the code and makes sure there aren't IP violations? Linux doesn't have IP roots. If it's true that IBM has violated, let's get some roots in the ground on this.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24

Yes, we're getting a good amount of support from the OEMs and even others in the Linux community. We have a good relationship with Sun [Microsystems]. Of all the companies, they are very clear in terms of licensing. They paid more than $100 million [in royalties]. They're not interested in destroying Unix.

IBM was unique in their push back. They know this is a problem, but they played a card. They underestimated our resolve. This is not about eking out some [marketing development funds] or getting more money for the quarter. This is our most prized possession. We're the source of AIX, HP UX, Solaris, Linux, Mac OSX. It all comes from us. The only one that hasn't been rationalized [from a licensing perspective] is Linux. If people signed a source code license with us, they have to think hard about how they protected it or didn't protect it.-- Darl McBride, 2003-04-24