SCO predicted billions in Linux licences

Darl McBride is hoping for billions

SCO was predicting that revenues from its SCOsource licences for Linux would generate billions of dollars for the company, chief executive Darl McBride testified in a deposition on 27 March 2007.

The company did "a lot of work" to create models projecting potential revenues.

"It's just a ridiculously big number," McBride said, according to a court transcript (PDF) posted on the Groklaw legal website.

"I guess we could get finite on whether the number is $5bn or $1bn or $6bn. The point is that it was a lot of money for the company, and the size of company that we were."

The projected sales far outstripped the value that investors attributed to the business. At the peak of SCO's legal offensive, the company's stock was valued at roughly $400m. The current market capitalisation stands at about $28m.

SCO claims to own key elements of the intellectual property used in the Unix operating system, and alleges that its code has ended up illegally in Linux distributions.

The company filed a lawsuit against IBM in 2003 in which it alleged that Big Blue illegally contributed SCO source code to Linux. At the time it also started selling licences for its alleged intellectual property under the SCOsource banner.