Darl McBride
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McBride holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Brigham Young University and received a Masters 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.
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. Forbes magazine website (http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/18/cz_dl_0618linux.html) reports he sued IKON in 1997, winning a settlement that he says was worth US$3 million. 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. 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.
Recently, he has become very unpopular in the information technology industry. McBride conceived of and initiated a 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. If proved to be true, this would also apply to essentially the entire core technology of the enterprise data processing industry, which is based on various versions of Unix.
McBride has specifically targeted Linux in a complex and confusing series of legal actions. This has especially angered the open source and Linux communities due to the SCO v. IBM Linux lawsuit in which he has had higher than usual involvement for a CEO (as opposed to just letting the legal department of SCO do everything). 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." [1] (http://www.crn.com/sections/special/top25/top25_03.asp?ArticleID=45992)