“On my birth certificate, under my father’s occupation, it says cowboy. So I will admit to being a cowboy, but not sue-happy.”

– Former SCO CEO Darl McBride, November 2003

Looks like Darl McBride, SCO’s “sue-happy cowboy” CEO, has seen his last roundup. In a new 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, the company reveals that under the order of a bankruptcy court, it has eliminated the chief executive officer and president positions and consequently sacked McBride.

Which means SCO’s seemingly endless legal campaign may have finally found its end. For though the company says it plans to pursue litigation against IBM (IBM) and Novell (NOVL), there seems little promise in it now. SCO is mired in bankruptcy. It’s evidently still unable to prove that Linux illegally contains its UNIX System V source code. And now it has fired the guy who devoted the past six years attempting to do just that.

And, frankly, SCO is better off for it. As Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eben Moglen once said, “As an amateur scholar of constitutional law, Mr. McBride is longer than he is deep.” And this does appear to be the case. Because despite vast swaths of evidence to the contrary, McBride always appeared certain that SCO had successfully defended its intellectual property in court.

“We’ve obviously overachieved on that objective,” McBride said of SCO’s efforts to defend against IBM’s alleged intellectual property infringements in 2004. “If I had to make this decision [to sue IBM] ten times over, the decision would be the same one ten times. Big Blue is no doubt a formidable opponent and we still expect to win. Keep your eye on the [court] filings. Over the coming year, one of the things that you’re going to see is that Big Blue has got big problems.”

Obviously, Big Blue wasn’t the one with the big problems.

“For the last several months, we have consistently stated and maintained that our System V code is in Linux,” McBride explained. “The claims SCO has are both broad and deep. These claims touch not just IBM but other vendors as well. They also touch certain industry consortia and corporate Linux end users. Our claims aren’t trivial. The violations of our intellectual property are not easily repaired. It is our intention to vigorously protect and enforce SCO’s intellectual property, System V source code and our copyrights. We’re now fully prepared to do that.”

And they did. SCO subsequently filed suit against IBM (IBM), auto giant DaimlerChrysler and a coterie of other companies, each time sounding the same theme: Our copyrighted UNIX code was illegally cobbled into Linux. You’re using it without a license. Pay up.

But SCO never specified exactly the Linux code it believes infringes on its copyrights, even in the face of repeated calls to do so from its defendants and the open source community. Indeed, it could be said that the company’s legal campaign against Linux was defined by its utter failure to prove that the open-source operating system contains any of its intellectual property. Certainly, that was the opinion of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, which found that the copyright to UNIX and UnixWare was owned by Novell. That decision drove SCO into bankruptcy and ended its high-profile legal attack on Linux.

But only for a time. Because a federal appeals court on Monday ruled that SCO is entitled to a jury trial on its claims to Unix, a ruling that might lead to a renewal of the company’s campaign against Linux. “We take no position on which party ultimately owns the Unix copyrights or which copyrights were required for Santa Cruz to exercise its rights under the agreement,” the court wrote in its ruling. “Such matters are for the finder of fact on remand.”

And so, astonishingly, this six-year battle is headed back to court once again, a development Darl McBride was quick to spin as a vindication in one of his typically pontifical pronouncements. “Today is not the end of the war but it certainly is a key battle that we’ve won,” he said of the decision. “Now it’s time to move on to the next series of battles with our victory in hand.”

Of course, for events to play out that way, SCO must prove that Unix contains its intellectual property, something it has so far failed abysmally to do. Indeed, the judge presiding over the original case compared SCO’s claims to those of a store owner accusing someone of shoplifting but refusing to say what items had been stolen. As Linux creator Linus Torvalds once said, “There really is a reason why nobody believes a word SCO is saying, and it’s because SCO is lying.”

Wired News: So how’s business been since this ruling?
Darl McBride: This has zero to do with our open-server business. That has nothing to do with these fights. That’s 70% of our revenue. And finally, it has nothing to do with our new mobility products we are working on. All of our product business is really unaffected by this ruling, other than the noises in our marketplaces.
–Wired News interview with Darl McBride, CEO and president of SCO Group, Sept. 10

ComputerWorld: Can SCO survive even if it ultimately loses the legal fights?
Darl McBride: I think it’s one of the more exciting times for this company. There’s a story my general counsel shared with me. By coming out right now and saying this is an exciting time, it’s like the boxer who has come out of the ring after getting all beaten up, and he comes over to his trainer and says, ‘The guy didn’t touch me.’ And the trainer says, ‘Then you better keep your eye on the ref, because somebody’s beating the living hell out of you.’ “
–ComputerWorld interview with Darl McBride, CEO and president of SCO Group, Sept. 6

When a company begins characterizing its assets as merely “those remaining,” as the SCO Group did earlier this year, bankruptcy is an inevitability. So it comes as little surprise to learn that the company’s hard-fought, but ultimately ludicrous, four-year legal campaign against Linux has ended in a Chapter 11 filing. Seems using litigation as a profit center to compensate for market losses isn’t such a grand idea after all.

“The Board of Directors of the SCO Group have unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders and employees,” the company said in a statement, adding that it has filed a petition for reorganization in addition to the Chapter 11 filing. SCO said the filings will help ensure that it “will not have any interruption in maintaining and honoring all of its commitments to its customers” and will allow it to pay its vendors.

The reorganization, it claims, “ensures business as usual.”

It’s worth noting, however, that the preceding is a “forward-looking statement.” And as we all know, those often involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated …

(Darl McBride image courtesy Bill Stearns)