SCO’s McBride: ‘We’re MAD’

There are many that think that SCO , the company embattled in a four-year old legal battle against Linux, is “mad.”

Today in an
afternoon conference call from the SCO Forum conference currently under way
in Las Vegas, SCO CEO Darl McBride confirmed that SCO is indeed “MAD,” but
it’s not what you think.

“If people think SCO has gone crazy or ‘MAD’ it’s now official,” McBride
said.

McBride was not talking about SCO’s ongoing litigation with IBM, Novell and
others in reference to alleged infringements of intellectual property, but
rather about its mobile development initiatives.

“We are ‘MAD’ in the sense that we have a Mobile Application Developer in
EdgeBuilder that is not like a typical SDK,” McBride explained.

SCO announced its Edge initiative, a MAD initiative, earlier this year.

Today SCO expanded the initiative with a Microsoft Visual
Studio partnership that includes a MAD Toolkit plug-in of Visual Studio 2005.

The company is also now a Premier Partner in Microsoft’s VSIP program, which allows SCO to redistribute Visual Studio 2005. The MAD Toolkit includes APIs, as
well as a runtime, which is intended to enable developers to test and develop
new EdgeClick mobile applications.

When SCO first announced EdgeClick, McBride called it a turning point. He echoed the sentiment on today’s call.

SCO also announced toady a strategic business partnership with Day-Timers,
Inc. that will see SCO developing and marketing mobile automation solutions
under the Day-Timer brand.

Though McBride was focused on discussing SCO’s mobile efforts, he did make
mention of the firm’s ongoing Linux litigation.

SCO recently filed an appeal in reference to a decision by
Utah district court Judge Brooke Wells who ruled in favor of granting IBM’s
motion to eliminate 187 of the 294 SCO claims due to a lack of specificity.

“We’re not here at this conference to talk much about the lawsuits,”
McBride said.

“We’re going to have our day in court in six months. We’ve been
fighting this high profile litigation battle to protect our intellectual
property going on four years now.

“We’ve spent nearly $50 million in that battle,” McBride continued. “We
believe in our case, we are looking forward to having our day in front of
the courts.”

McBride will get his day in February 2007.