Darl McBride has the unenviable reputation as the man who tried to milk Linux.

As CEO and president of SCO Group, McBride has spent the last few years trying to collect billions in licensing fees from companies using the Linux operating system, earning the wrath of the world's open-source geeks. For scores of programmers, here was a lawyered-up copyright troll trying to shake down Linux – the free, open-source operating system built by idealistic hackers working for the common good.

But McBride insists he's just misunderstood.

In 1995, SCO (then known as Caldera Systems) bought the Unix operating system from Novell for $149 million, but who owned the copyrights wasn't clear, and years of litigation ensued.

While the case ground through the courts, SCO tried to collect licensing fees from some 1,500 corporate Linux users, claiming that portions of Linux are based on Unix, and thus violated SCO's copyrights.

But on Aug. 10th, a Utah district court judge ruled that SCO did not own Unix copyrights outright. The ruling potentially puts SCO on the hook for $25 million in licensing fees to Novell – and it undermines another pending lawsuit against IBM, which claims $1 billion damages against Big Blue for "devaluing" Unix.

Despite the ruling, McBride says he's not giving up. SCO appealed the Utah decision last week.

Meanwhile, McBride has watched his Utah technology concern's stock plummet to less than 70 cents, after rising to nearly $30 a share in 2000.

In a sit-down interview with Wired News, McBride insisted investors were wrong to abandon the company after the ruling. He explained that SCO is branching out into the mobility business with the upcoming launch of Shout Postcard – an ad-driven, mobile video service that McBride thinks will be financially "gi-normous."

One thing is pretty likely – Linux fanatics, who hate SCO, probably won't line up for the service.

__Wired News: __You're vilified in the open-source community.

__McBride: __I've noticed.

__WN: __People are calling you a troll. What do you say to people who say that you are an open-source terrorist?

__McBride: __It's the negative image our enemies have tried to create around the company and around me as an individual.

__WN: __You knew you'd be vilified?

__McBride: __In this particular case we're talking about, I joined the company, and we had problems with our intellectual property.... I said we should protect our rights.... The former CEO said, if you do that, you will be vilified by the Linux community. The Linux community will attack you. You will be hated. Don't go down that path.

Well that's not a reason to not step up and defend your property. That's not a reason to stand back and say, "I'm not going to fight." We got attacked, vilified and we got branded as pariahs. When you pay 149 million dollars for a property, do you have the right to defend it or not? I think it's a matter of principle. I think anybody in their right mind who was in my position would have done the same thing if they had half a backbone.

__WN: __What does it say that your stock is under a dollar?

__Darl McBride: __When the ruling came down from the Utah court, our stock lost 75 percent of its value. So it obviously tells you there are a lot of people who are following this case and assigning value to what happens, to what is coming out of the court rulings. We're obviously very disappointed and, in fact, highly surprised at the ruling.

__WN: __A contract is a contract. It seems phenomenal that there's a dispute over who owns the rights to Unix, something that's worth a lot of money.

__McBride: __That's one of the points that we made, and that's why we are surprised that this thing is not going in front of a jury.

We have in the asset-purchase agreement this contradictory language.... Under "included assets" it says: "SCO hereby purchases all right, title and interest in the Unix operating system, including all versions of Unix." OK, that sounds pretty solid. That sounds like you got all the rights there.

Then in the "excluded assets" it says, "excluding copyrights and patents." Well, that's the thing that never made sense. So when I first hired on (at) the company, we had intellectual property attorneys look at that, and they said, "This makes no sense." You can't buy software without the copyright. It's like buying a book without the words. It doesn't make any sense at all....

Now, I'm not an attorney. But my understanding is that summary judgment rules say that if each side has a legitimate story, that it should go to a jury. To me we have more than a legitimate story. We think we have the winning story.

__WN: __And the story is …

__McBride: __We own the rights and copyrights of the Unix operating system, supported by nine witnesses. They have one person who wasn't even at the negotiating table who said, "I took the copyrights off before we closed the deal."

__WN: __I assume you want another day in court?

__McBride: __We'll fight this on appeal no matter how long it takes.... The second thing that is more problematic for Linux customers in general, not just Novell customers, is on page 66 of the opinion, the judge basically says copyrights of Unix up to 1995 are owned by Novell. (But) any of the copyrights developed by SCO after 1995 are owned by SCO.

The significance of that is if you go take a snapshot of code that is out there today, a substantial portion of it has been developed post-1995, either in terms of new code, redeveloped code, or code that didn't even exist.

__WN: __So why did investors run?

__McBride: __Most investors have never read the opinion. They've read the conclusion. If that's all you read, you would probably run too. Even as employees, the first hours this was out, it was amazing how big of a deal it was, how damaging it was to us.

It wasn't until we stepped back a little bit and took a deep breath and said, "OK, let's plow through this opinion," and started looking, that we realized: Hey, wait a second, we have non-compete (issues) still on the table; we have Project Monterey still on the table against IBM; we still have copyrights against Linux users for post-1995 work.

WN: So how's business been since this ruling?

__McBride: __This has zero to do with our open-server business. That has nothing to do with these fights. That's 70 percent 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 market places.