As The SCO Group's reseller and developer community gathers for its annual SCO Forum convention in Las Vegas this week, one question on many attendees' minds will be whether the company's future will be as a software vendor or as a litigator. Though SCO's lawsuits against IBM, Novell, DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone have attracted a great deal of attention in the last year, they have not helped SCO's bottom line. The company is facing mounting financial losses, which have been spurred by millions of dollars in legal fees, a flagging Unix business, and anemic sales of its SCOsource Linux licensing program, which brought in just $11,000 in revenue during the company's most recent financial quarter.
In the face of these challenges, SCO has apparently chosen to make the company's core Unix business, and not its legal adventures, the center of this year's show. SCO will spend the week discussing new Unix products, such as the first developer preview of its next generation of OpenServer software, as well as a new developer program it expects to launch by year's end, called the SCO Marketplace Initiative, which will use an online bidding system to attract developers to work on SCO's Unix operating systems.
The IDG News Service interviewed SCO CEO Darl McBride before the start of SCO Forum to get his thoughts on the direction of the company, the likelihood of more customer lawsuits, and his company's recent decision to revive the Unix System Laboratories name that AT&T had used for its Unix business in the early 1990s. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Why haven't more customers signed up for your SCOsource licensing program?
There have been a lot of third parties that have jumped into the fray and put indemnification programs in place -- big vendors coming out trying to say "Don't worry about it, it's not a problem."
Rather than trying to pound through all of those issues on a daily basis, we've been content to say, "We're going to work our issues through the courtroom, and when everything is resolved there, we'll be good to go, and then customers will know exactly where everything is. In the meantime, customers that want to move now and remove the cloud of uncertainty, we have a program for that. So we're fine with where things are right now.
By saying you're fine with things, do you mean that you don't expect to be launching any new lawsuits against Linux users?
I think right now we've got the claims in front of the various courts that we need in order to get our complaints heard and to get them argued and to get resolution. With respect to being more vocal or going after new targets at the customer level, we don't see the need for that. We had the need to get the basic issues on the table, but we're fine to argue the merits of what we have out there right now (in) the current litigation setting.
How many people are working on the SCOsource initiative?
Within the company, less than 10 people. There are occasions where it will be a little bit bigger than that, we'll have a few things come up that will require a bit more horsepower. We do have, obviously, a lot more attorneys than that, who are focused on SCOsource. But the majority of the company resources are very directly pegged to the SCO Unix business.
Would it make sense to split the company in two, with one part focusing on the core Unix business and the other focusing on SCOsource?
Essentially we have done that internally. We pretty much have those divisions in place right now. The argument that you're bringing up, I have been asked about a fair number of times from the financial community: Does it make sense to have an actual organizational split? We haven't got to that point in our thinking yet, but we continue to look at all of our options as we continue down the road.
I wouldn't rule it out in the future. I certainly understand the positive arguments for it. We haven't gotten to the point yet, where we think that is the play we should be taking on, but it could evolve to that point, and I could see a number of reasons why that would be a good play.
Why did SCO recently decide to file a trademark claim for AT&T's old Unix subsidiary, Unix Systems Laboratories (USL)?
There are a couple of reasons around going back to the USL part of the business. It's really a situation of going back to the future, if you will. We look into the future and fully expect that we're going to have some sort of a win against IBM in the courtroom. We know we've got another year and a quarter before we end up in front of a jury trial here in Utah, but we are preparing ourselves right now that as we move forward and as we do get justice in the courtrooms, what is our business going to look like?
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