[ Thanks to keanu for
this link. ]
“Back in June, there was a protest by Linux users at SCO
headquarters, which received some coverage in the press, including
here on Groklaw. I now have a transcript of the conversation
between SCO CEO Darl McBride and the protesters. I’ve also listened
to the tape to verify the accuracy of the transcript, and you can
do the same if you can play .ogg files, here. There are a couple of
places where the sound isn’t clear, so I’ve indicated that in the
transcript.“McBride talks about a number of issues, such as SGI, whether
SCO intended to sue end users or commercial only, how and when they
discovered the alleged ‘infringement,’ Caldera’s contributions to
Linux, and whether Debian is a safe version of GNU/Linux to use
because of its noncommercial nature. He also tells them that SCO
isn’t interested in suing individual users or even small commercial
users. Its beef, he says, is with the ‘Unix vendor community,’
UNIX-licensing companies switching to Linux and donating code to
Linux so they don’t have to pay any more royalties to SCO for Unix
code, ‘the vendors that are getting an economic incentive to
reducing the amount of royalties that they pay by virtue of taking
our property and putting it into Linux, then turn around and saying
it’s a free system.’ He mentions that they were talking about
64-way systems, not home users.“He also says they found ‘hundreds of thousands of lines of code
that are infringing against our contracts.’ Note the plural on
contracts. He claims the increase in functionality in Linux is
because of ‘vendors’ that SCO has ‘confidentiality agreements’
with. Again, note the plural…”