I suppose the simple requirement is 'to return or destroy'. We haven't made that language up. That was in the contract that we picked up that AT&T and IBM had agreed to.

So I guess you simply take the copies of AIX that are out there and send them back to us, or you destroy them and give us notice of the date of destruction. It calls for that in the contract to certify that destruction has taken place.

Over the years, either SCO or its predecessors have put vendors on notice and those vendors stepped back in line very quickly, because everybody saw that going through this process and having your contract terminated was not a good thing.

So we really are in unprecedented waters. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Until the court case has been heard there is nothing you can do to enforce this, is there?
We have other rights under the contract that we are looking at. For example, we can audit IBM customers. SCO has audit rights on its customers. The reality is that we are going into discovery right now and that might be the vehicle to be able to investigate what we need there anyway.

There are other options we are looking at that we haven't gone down the road on yet. But for now it's playing the legal path.

Are you still saying categorically that there is offending code in the Linux kernel?
Yeah. That one is a no-brainer. When you look in the code base and you see line-by-line copy of our Unix System V code - not just the code itself, but comments to the code, titles that were in the comments and humour elements that were in the comments - you see that everything is taken straight across.

Everything is exactly the same except they have stripped off the copyright notices and pretended it was just Linux code. There could not be a more straightforward case on the Linux side.

And that's actually the Linux kernel, as opposed to other parts?
Correct, the kernel.

Have you given any thought to what these actions will do to your future business and your name as a company?
[When] people who have legitimate businesses and legitimate intellectual property that they want to protect see our code - and we've had a couple of dozen viewings now of the offending code - they just shake their heads and say: 'We can't believe [IBM is] doing this.' So we are already seeing the public opinion tide start to turn.

We're doing better business now than we have in the history of our company. From a pure business standpoint things haven't been better.

Did you know from your time at Novell that there was a legal case for SCO?
I'd been at SCO two months and [was] in the process of doing my research and really understanding what the company was about and what the opportunities were.

I talked to the top half-dozen executives inside the company and I talked to probably another dozen industry executives.

And in that process I heard from people inside and outside the company and from a top-level industry executive [about IBM's] Project Monterey.

When IBM walked away from Project Monterey it put a dagger into the heart of SCO. Santa Cruz Operation lost its heart at that point and sold its business to Caldera. Caldera tried to run it as a commercial business. That didn't work and it was nearly flat-lined when we took over last year.

What you see in this company right now is some resuscitation effort. We are coming back. The heart is beating very nicely. We're out of hospital and back in the marketplace. The company is totally revived around this concept that we were supposed to be the big dog.

You go back to SCO's brand in the 1990s and it was Unix on Intel. SCO was primed to seize the multibillion-dollar server market of Unix on Intel that hit in the early 2000s that has in fact shifted over to Red Hat.

We've been wronged and been wronged seriously, and part of the reason you don't see IBM fighting back right now is that those guys over there know what was going on.

Those guys know what is going to come out in discovery, and you hear a lot of rumours on the street that they are going to buy us out.

Well, I bet that's exactly what they want to do. The last thing they want to hear is the testimony that is going to come out.

Click here to read part one of this interview.

Click here to read part three of this interview.

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