My mission was to infiltrate it.
Clayton is an inner suburb of St Louis -- a second downtown filled with tall buildings, but without the spots of decay that mar the first downtown near the Arch. The Radisson Hotel is near the center, big and posh, though not as glitzy as the Ritz-Carlton down the street. An automated piano, unattended, played easy-listening melodies as I descended the stairs to the Stamford room where SCO was holding its meeting. There were about a dozen attendees, plus four representatives from SCO.
Larry Gasparro, Vice President of North America Sales, led off with a slide show summarizing SCO's prospects, emphasizing the new revenue from licensing, and the recent rise in the stock price. He crowed proudly about the Deloitte report listing SCO as one of the most rapidly growing technology companies, and about the glowing buy recommendation from Deutsche Bank on the previous day.
As reported earlier for the first SCO road show, one of the slides noted that SCO had 330 employees. I asked how many of those were developers. "About 20%", was the answer. Upon further questioning, Gasparro admitted that they didn't have as many developers as they used to, though he didn't provide any numbers for earlier staffing levels. Patrick Cummings, another of the SCO representatives, added that SCO had fewer employees, period, not just developers.
The obvious conclusion: SCO is a shrinking company. Gasparro was quick to offer the counter: lots of people in the industry have been laid off. Many companies are outsourcing their IT work to India.
I offered a fig leaf. "Are you suggesting that your employee base is shrinking because you're outsourcing some of the work?" No, they're not. They have employees in India but they're not outsourcing. In other words, outsourcing is a red herring. SCO is indeed a shrinking company, at least as measured by the size of its work force.
Sooner or later Gasparro had to acknowledge the controversy over SCO's intellectual property. He took the standard line: it may be unpopular, but we have protect our intellectual property, it's the right thing to do, to protect our copyrights and our patents.
My ears perked up. "Wait a minute," I asked. "Are you saying that SCO has patents? It was my understanding that SCO owned no relevant patents for Unix, that they were retained by Novell."
Cornered, he backed off. "I don't know about patents." He's not a lawyer.
A later slide listed "methods" and "know-how" as types of intellectual property. I asked: "Does that mean that I can write a program with no copyright issues, no patent issues, no trademark issues, and no trade secret issues, and still be sued because it infringes your know-how?"
Gasparro dismissed the question as hypothetical. Besides, he's not a lawyer.
I pressed further. "Is it an infringement if IBM takes its own code, that it wrote itself, and adds it both to AIX and to Linux?"
Gasparro declined to answer. He's not a lawyer. However, one of the resellers in the audience, evidently an SCO loyalist, responded that as far as he was concerned, it would be an infringement.
Once Gasparro finished his spiel, a systems engineer named Dave Stetzel took over, to discuss SCO's plans for future development. Though no one said so explicitly, there was a general sense that SCO was playing catch-up, trying to add a lot of features that were readily available elsewhere. Some of the resellers expressed frustration. They were losing sales because SCO's products were so inadequate, especially OpenServer.
Stetzel remarked, "We haven't been proficient in getting things updated."
Gasparro added, "We made it difficult for developers to stay with OpenServer."
As has often been noted elsewhere, many of these upgrades to SCO's products depend on open source software. I asked if SCO would be redistributing any software under the GPL. I already knew that the answer would be yes.
Then I pointed out that public statements from SCO had declared the GPL to be legally invalid.
This blatant contradiction didn't seem to bother anybody. Gasparro assured us that they were complying with the GPL in their distribution of Samba and other GPL'd software. He didn't comment on the validity of the GPL. He's not a lawyer.
There followed a tedious discussion of new licensing arrangements for OpenServer and UnixWare. One kind of license gives you the right to install on multiple servers.
I asked a seemingly innocent question. "How does that work? If I want to install on a hundred servers, do I have to get a hundred installation CDs, or can I install all of them from a single CD?"
Gasparro responded that the customer can do it either way. He didn't seem to notice that this answer contradicts SCO's construction of copyright law. According to SCO, you can't legally copy a piece of software more than once, even if the license gives you explicit permission to do so.
By now it was lunchtime, and the presentation was running late. Stetzel hurried through a laundry list of hardware and software vendors that were lining up to work with SCO. Not surprisingly, this list included HP. "We drive 30% of HP's hardware sales." Surprisingly, it also included IBM for hardware sales, despite the lawsuits. "That's a different division."
Finally, we broke for lunch. I didn't want to accept food from SCO, and I didn't want to stay for the afternoon sessions, which looked like they would be boring. I waited until everybody else was in the next room for lunch. Then I sneaked back into the meeting room and left a copy of the SCO/Linux FAQ on the table for each attendee.
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when they returned from lunch.
Larry Gasparro, a sales manager, acted like a nice guy. He was very cordial to me when I chatted with him at a mid-morning break, even though I had given him something of a hard time. I asked him if there had been a culture clash between the strait-laced Mormons of Utah and the laid back denizens of Santa Cruz. He said that everybody had expected a clash, but that it had turned out not to be a problem.
He's slippery, though. In his job he probably has to be. He's quick to make expansive claims about SCO's intellectual property rights. But when you try to pin him down, he invariably backs off, professes ignorance, or changes the subject. He's not a lawyer.