Linux Code Red…… The Salt Lake City Weekly Story

Probably the best summary piece I’ve read on the SCO story and it comes not only from a non-IT magazine, but from a business magazine in Utah, great….

Here are the first few lines, please head on over to Salt Lake City Weekly to read the full article.

It’s taken more than a decade, millions of man hours and an international movement bent on software sovereignty to poise Linux as the fastest-growing player in information technology. Now, on the cusp of punching through proprietary software’s kung-fu grip on the market, a fuming little Utah County company threatens to stomp Linux dead in its tracks.

“I’ve been pounding the table here for a year or so saying there’s no free lunch, and there is going to be a day of reckoning for every company that thinks they are going to try and sell a free model.” That’s Darl McBride, president and CEO of the SCO Group, a perennial loser at selling UNIX and, until recently, Linux operating systems.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that SCO posted hundreds of millions in losses from 1994 to 2002.

But ever since determining it owns the “ark and the covenant to the enterprise software industry,” says McBride, SCO’s bad fortune is on the upswing.

The article is great, it goes on to quite a few pages and gives an excellent and seemingly unbiased timeline.

TurboTas 2004.