Comment by gemstones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gemstones | Hacker News Reader

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I hadn't heard of Darl McBride (CEO of SCO) and I looked at his LinkedIn; this is his side of the story from his time at SCO, as he puts in in his work experience section. I found it super interesting.

  All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround. 

  What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us, raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66 per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per share after losing an important trial. 

  IBM teamed up with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One". Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh? I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders.

  The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver.

  Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and entertainment.

And today he's a Marjorie Taylor Green-retweeting bankrupt conspiracy theorist. Funnily enough his personal website <title> is "Billionaire Cheat Codes"

IDK, if I was put in charge of a company losing money like crazy and was genuinely trying to turn it around, my first thought would not be "oh, let's hire David Boies".

I know! For HN readers not familiar with the legal industry, Boies was considered the superstar of the legal world at the time and was well known to demand $50 million retainers.

As I recall, Microsoft put up a ton of money to fund the SCO lawsuit. They didn't hire Boies out of Unix profits.

I waded into this thread to point that out.

Some people are mystified by why so many long time free software people don't think microsoft is suddenly a good actor these days.

My point isn’t that McBride was doing something financially irresponsible, my point is that he’s obviously lying.

He’s technically only claiming that turning the company around was his job description when recruited. Is that this was a lie told to him.

Even if he's getting fed nothing but lies by someone else about how IBM really did steal their source code and winning this is in the bag and will totally turn the company around, and somehow has no ability to discern the truth himself, you still don't hire David Boies to deal with that.

You've decided to throw down with IBM with a lawsuit that could result in billions in damages. You've convinced yourself you're going to win, lies or no. Microsoft is shoveling money at you to do it. And......you aren't going to go hire a gold-plated superstar litigator, the guy whose already spanked Microsoft in court, "to deal with that"?

With all due respect...the hell you aren't.

> gold-plated

In 2003? Boies was probably best known for losing one of the most watched court cases in American history.

He's a great choice... if you want an savvy operator with a weak moral compass to pump your stock. Not so much if you want to win because you believe the company is in the right and has a promising future. (He might do that too, but no better than dozens of other effective lawyers.)

...and he's the (real) bad guy in the Theranos story. [Bad Blood, by John Carrerou]

It's weird. Boies got a great rep vs. Microsoft representing the Justice department, and obviously for working on the side of angels in Bush v. Gore, but he's also taken on some really ethically questionable clients -- among them, obviously, is SCO, but also tobacco companies. And, not for nothing, he both represented and served as a director for THERANOS.

And that's without even MENTIONING his involvement with Weinstein and the use of Israeli private intel company Black Cube to dredge up dirt on both Harvey's victims and the reporters covering the case.

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-835-Exhibit_224.pdf follows a good explaination of sco's tactics at the time. During the lawsuit a dedicated server company rackshack (later ev1 servers) bought a license for all their users between. According to the owner Robert Marsh later in the trial, he felt in the end SCO was misleading and provided false information.

His personal website contains gems like this one:

> "Darl McBride will be remembered as one who fought for the rights of the individual against tyranny, for freedom against slavery, for intellectual liberty against herd mentality. In short, he is a Howard Roark (Ayn Rand's protagonist in 'The Fountainhead') for our age."

> Francis Erdman, Blog Kinetic

And other heavily narcissistic quotes. Not surprising that he saw nothing wrong in appropriating other people's voluntary work and calling them long haired stinkies at the same time.

What a fellow :)

If the stock went so low, couldn't IBM or whoever just buy SCO? Or were not there not a controlling number of shares available?

The LWN article discusses this point:

> it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. ...

> IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort.

I shit on a lot that IBM does, but at the end of the day, I will always give them respect for what they did against SCO. If they rolled over, that would have given validity to SCO's claims and who knows where Linux would be today.

If you can win, why set that precedent? The negative result for SCO is very useful to the rest of society.

It would have been more interesting to see SCO/Caldera being turned into a profitable Unix company, rather than going the lawsuit route. All development of SCOs products just stopped, there were never an attempt to turn the company around.

>retaining David Boies to represent us,

That name!!!

I followed the SCO lawsuit closely through Groklaw and /. back in the day.

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