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SCO boss climbs down over Linux assault

He didn't say it. Well he can't remember saying it. Well he was just imagining somebody else saying it then

SCO boss Doug Michels has made a partial climbdown and apology over his apparent massive assault on Linux and Linus Torvalds. Responding to a query about the interview, Michels says he can't remember referring to the Linux community as "punk kids," and that it was by no means a complete report of his original discussion with Computerworld. "The interview represents a few selected questions and fragments of answers, leaving out a lot of context," he says. "The discussion of Linux represented only a small fraction of the interview and I spent most of that time talking about how good the open source movement was for the industry." Michels also claims to have expressed "my personal admiration for Linus and all of the others who contribute so much of their personal time to this worthy effort. I reiterated SCO's ongoing support for Open Source and our commitment to continue to contribute and adopt open source technology." Unhappily, the Michels response we have doesn't cover the published claims that seemed most inflammatory to us. The attack on Red Hat, for example, the claims that Linux doesn't scale well, or the bizarre stuff about "some kid from Norway." But there's a possible solution to this. In failing to recall saying "punk kids," Michels suggests that if he did say it anyway, "it is possible those words came out of my mouth in some context. [well, yes...] Most likely in describing how I thought a CIO of a large company might feel about open source." OK, so although Doug himself is all for Linux and open source, if he thinks himself into the part of the CIO of a large company he can describe fears about punk kids, uncontrolled roadmaps, inadequate scalability and cloudy intellectual property issues. But it's the CIO that thinks this stuff. Not Doug. Oh, no sir... ®

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