Darl McBride

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Darl McBride (b. circa 1960) became the CEO of The SCO Group (formerly known as Caldera) on June 28, 2002. During his tenure, Caldera renamed itself The SCO Group, and on March 7, 2003 initiated litigation against IBM regarding the intellectual property status of the Linux operating system.

Contents

[edit] Education

McBride holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Brigham Young University and received a Master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is fluent in Japanese and spent time in Japan as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[1]

[edit] Career

From 1988 to 1996, he worked at Novell, where at first he was in charge of Novell Japan and later was vice president and general manager of Novell's Embedded Systems Division (NEST). He left Novell to become senior vice president of IKON Office Solutions. IKON fired him in 1998 after his involvement in the execution of 33 business acquisitions.[2] McBride then sued Ikon for $10 million, claiming breach of contract, nonpayment of wages, and fraud. Ikon counter-sued, and the case was eventually settled. At that time, McBride was also fighting a divorce battle in court with his first wife. He was also involved in two startups, SBI and Company, a professional services company, which he founded and served as CEO, and later was CEO of PointServe, a software company, both of which he raised venture capital for.[2] From August 2, 2000 McBride was the president of Franklin Covey's online planning business until a few months prior to his recruitment for the SCO Group.[3]

He became friend of Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera. When Love left the company in 2002, McBride replaced him. He was appointed by Ralph Yarro III, CEO of the Canopy Group, owners of Caldera at that time, who was also a personal friend.

[edit] Linux controversy

Recently, he has become notorious in the information technology industry for his strategy of claiming intellectual property rights covering all of the various UNIX operating systems developed by IBM under a license originally granted by AT&T (see SCO v. IBM Linux lawsuit). SCO and McBride's series of confusing and complex legal actions targeted at Linux have especially angered the open source, free software and Linux communities. He has also resorted to personal verbal attacks criticizing journalists covering the SCO litigation, and spending time on company conference calls describing how he's investigating their backgrounds: "All is not as appeared as it is in Groklaw land. … We're digging into who Pam Jones is, and we're close to the bottom."[4] As of Jan 2007 he has not disclosed who he thinks Pam Jones is.

A close friend of his, Ty Mattingly, is said to have told him, "Congratulations. In a few short months you've dethroned Bill Gates as the most hated man in the industry."[5] He has claimed to have received death threats from convicted felons, prompting him to carry a firearm and to employ multiple bodyguards.[1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b SCO so despised that chief is armed. deseretnews.com (2004-03-08). Retrieved on November 13, 2006.
  2. ^ a b Stone, Brad (July 2004). The Linux Killer. Wired. Retrieved on November 13, 2006.
  3. ^ Darl McBride – President and Chief Executive Officer. The SCO Group. Retrieved on November 13, 2006.
  4. ^ Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. (2005-05-10). SCO's Legal Wrangles Take an Odd, Personal Turn. eWeek.com. Retrieved on January 10, 2007.
  5. ^ Torode, Christina (2003-11-14). Top 25 Executives: Darl McBride, President and CEO, The SCO Group. CRN. Retrieved on November 13, 2006.

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../d/a/r/Darl_McBride_fd0e.html"
In other languages