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CRN Interview: SCO's Darl McBride and Chris Sontag

SCO CEO Darl McBride and Senior Vice President Chris Sontag met with CRN Industry Editor Barbara Darrow and VARBusiness Senior Executive Editor T.C. Doyle in Las Vegas. The conversation took place just hours after SCO said it made its chief litigator, David Boies, a stakeholder to the tune of 400,000 shares plus $1 million dollars.

Earlier this year SCO charged that IBM had illegally turned over Unix code to the Linux community. Tuesday, SCO said it will likely sue an end-user company using the Linux code at issue in the suit. The SCO-IBM case is slated to hit a Utah courtroom in 18 months.

CRN: You're paying David Boies [of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP] about $9 million to pursue your claims against IBM?

Darl McBride: We are giving him 400,000 shares of stock and $1 million in cash. When I said we have $60 some million in cash [on hand at SCO], reduce the cash by $1 million and we take non-cash charge. David comes on, he's now a shareholder, he's rowing with us, and let's face it, he's added significant value to our company since February. Our stock was around a buck, now it's $14. That's some of the best money we've spent, not even money, some of the best stock we've issued. Now we're broadening our scope and going after the cleanup project. The breadth of damage that's been done here, it's like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez... the code violation that is going on inside of Linux between derivative work, copyrighted work, it's not unsubstantial.

CRN: Can suing customers, as you've said you will, be good for any vendor?

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