SCO Building Up a War Chest

On the litigation front, SCO has sued IBM for more than $3 billion, warned SGI that it is in violation of its Unix agreement, and claims that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of Unix.

Asked by eWEEK if SCO is backing away from its threat to send invoices to corporations using Linux and to sue them, McBride said SCO wants to give customers a chance to work with the company around its licensing plan and the immunity that it will give customers using Linux going forward.

"Our plan was to work with them rather than drag them into court. Were getting very good feedback; were signing up additional deals, and its bearing fruit," McBride said. "Our goal was never to just go out there and sue them all, but rather to work together to resolve this, and were having good traction with our licensing discussions.

"Were not running a 100-yard sprint here; we are in a marathon, and were in this for the long haul," he said.

SCO has met with a number of "major" industry leaders and is not ruling out the possibility of some sort of industry settlement around the legal issues. The case is not just about IBM; it affects other players, so the industry as a whole might want to resolve them, and SCO is open to that, he said.

SCO is also in discussions with SGI. "We are pleased with SGIs behavior in the 60-day warning notice period we gave them," McBride said. "We are also pleased with the discussions there. We dont have any resolution today, but we continue with those discussions." McBride said there are no other "troubling" Unix vendor issues on the horizon.

However, SCO has 6,000 Unix licensees who could be using Linux in an infringement of its rights, and this is the area the company is now focusing on, he said.

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