The Mac-and-Mo SCO

The SCO/Linux tale is beginning to resemble nothing so much as the Hefer Commission of Inquiry into allegations about apartheid spies. Now sadly almost at an end, our own Mac-and-Mo show had all the posturing and sabre-rattling, not to mention the amusement value, of the fight between SCO and the Linux community.

SCO CEO Darl McBride, anyone will agree, knows how to get attention.

Carel Alberts, Technology editor, ITWeb

In these circuses, it`s important to keep your head, or alternatively, you could just give up and enjoy the fun. But at some point, you`ll tire of the antics and the reality of taxpayers` and shareholders` money being spent will hit home.

SCO CEO Darl McBride, anyone will agree, knows how to get attention. He rates right up there with Madonna and Britney, Mark Shuttleworth - I don`t exclude actual merit - and Felicia Mabusa-Suttle.

But it takes a special kind of talent to make your audience swallow your shameless self-promotion. Both McBride and Mac Maharaj (in the Hefer Commission) have found this out to their embarrassment.

One of Mac`s attempts to get noticed was especially lame, if off-the-cuff. According to the Sunday Times, he was seen outside court late last year, pledging to teach a band of unsmiling passers-by - his "supporters" he called them - how to toyi-toyi. It was so uninspired and awful that I applaud their staring back at him unmoved.

This points to rule number one in good PR and self-promotion: make sure you have something to say.

McBride has also fallen foul of this rule. In one report, he is quoted as saying that his opponents (those who use or sell Linux) do not believe in copyright protection, which has forced him to conclude that the future of the global economy hangs in the balance.

Well, you heard the man. Thank you, Darl.

Personally, I hate paying for software, or at least paying too much for it. I would especially hate paying for open source software, which has an important role to play in society, ideally allowing everyone to share in the wealth of information accumulated over the ages.

The similarities continue. SCO has for some time resisted saying which software code violates the trade secrets belonging to it. Its long-standing failure to do so has led observers to comment that they don`t believe the Penguin is endangered at all.

Now, the presiding judge has ordered it to hand this over, which stands to reason since this is the central tenet of its case. IBM, on the other hand, does not have to provide any source code to SCO.

According to the reports, SCO has in fact provided source code to IBM, but did so on a million printed pages, because it could do so "in the way it wanted". Never mind that it raised $50 million from a private placement to fund its fight, and seems not to care for the money-saving qualities of electronic formats.

This sounds a lot like old Mac and Mo again. Mac could only back up his claims of people being apartheid government spies by referring to a long list of (absent) documents that, he said, proved it. The list was a far cry from the small pack of documents brandished by the accusers in a television interview, which naturally made the commission tetchy.

By Maharaj`s own admission, the list was drawn up in haste and from memory, and in commission evidence leader Kessie Naidu`s words, the list is so voluminous that one would need trucks to haul its referenced content to the witness stand.

In my opinion, Novell hasn`t done many things right in the past, but the company has made a stunning comeback, championing the fight for Linux. In an open letter to McBride, Novell`s CEO claimed its sale of Unix to SCO in 1995 transferred neither copyright nor patents associated with it.

That, if true, would make SCO`s prospects look pretty bleak. And the questions Novell asked of SCO earlier this year still apply: What specific code was copied from Unix System V? Where can we find this code in Linux? Who copied this code? Why does this alleged copying infringe SCO`s intellectual property?

I never had much hope for the Mac-and-Mo show, but at least SCO can, by answering these questions, elevate this expensive, damaging suit to something beyond a sideshow.