SCO claims world software market under threat

“The SCO Group’s CEO, Darl McBride, enlisted the help of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to bolster his arguments against the open source GPL (GNU General Public License) and Linux during a keynote address at the CD Expo conference in Las Vegas. Citing WIPO data, McBride said that the value of the worldwide software market would approach US$229 billion by 2007, and that it was being threatened by the ideas behind the Free Software Foundation’s GPL, the software licence that governs Linux. ‘The world, especially here in America, is shifting to one that is an information society,’ McBride said. ‘In the future, is that $229 billion in software still going to be there? Or in the case of the Free Software Foundation’s goal, is proprietary software going to go away?’ Attendees of McBride’s keynote were handed a WIPO primer on intellectual property (IP) law entitled ‘Intellectual Property: A Power Tool for Economic Growth.’ The pamphlet had been shipped to SCO by WIPO free of charge, a SCO spokesman said.”

Whine, whine.