McBride: I think it comes back to property rights. The overarching question to all of this is, where is software going in five years from now? Is it along the lines of the FSF Charter, which is all free, or is the $200 billion-plus software market growing and thriving? If you talk to Oracle, Microsoft or anybody who has a booming software business, I believe they probably hope that we are right in this fight. So, I think the question if software is going to be free or not will actually come back as a positive. Think about the glass half-empty, glass half-full scenario. If SCO's right, then that reinforces property rights and people can make money. I would argue that if we don't win this, it will be a bad day for the world of software developers.
VB: You make the credible case that this is the plan of attack: "Put it out in the courts; we think we are right; we'll get our justice that way." But what happens if this thing takes what many expect to be a prolonged period of time? And how can you be sure that SCO does not wither before you get your justice in the end?
McBride: Fair question. The answer to that is by innovating on our core Unix products. If you look at the announcements we have made over the past month, we have moved UnixWare and OpenServer down the field. [By press time] we released SCO OfficeServer. We've got a small foot product, which is an embedded point-of-sale device-type management OS, which we are excited about. And we have a bunch more in the labs that we are cooking up. So, we're not just sitting back saying, "Let's wait until the courtroom victory." We're aggressively and actively pursuing our innovation plans around our core Unix business.
Now, we're at a severe disadvantage"being a platform company and not mentioned in the top two platforms that people want to go to. So, what it means in the short term, we think we have an opportunity, a great opportunity, to go out and service the 2 million-plus server-installed base that we have right now. And we'll have, maybe, a little bit of upside with new customers. But until we have that courtroom win, I think it's going to be hard to go out and legitimately talk about a huge growth story around Unix because, let's face it, Linux and UnixWare are competing for the same customer. And the mindshare in the marketplace right now is clearly around Linux.
VB: When you look back over the year, what are the high points for you?
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