Two years after SCO accused IBM of illegally using its intellectual property in Linux, the Utah-based company has dramatically softened its tone. But this change of attitude does not mean that SCO no longer believes that Linux is infringing on its copyrights.

SCO does accept, however, that the verbal and legal mud fights were taking their toll on employees and keeping it from the core business of developing software.

The day before the official start of LinuxWorld, vnunet.com sat down with SCO's chief executive, Darl McBride, at the company's annual SCO Forum in Las Vegas.

The event took place six weeks after SCO unveiled version 6.0 of its OpenServer operating system, which has been hailed as a good upgrade for existing users. SCO claims an installed based of about two million licences.

If you had five minutes at LinuxWorld to address the delegates, what would you tell them?

I would ask that both parties sit down and recognise what is going on here. It feels like a civil war going on among the Unixes. Meanwhile there is this other competitor called Windows that is capturing the opportunity.

There is a story in the Wall Street Journal today in which the CIO of Tommy Hillfiger said: "We are bailing out on Linux because of predictability problems and a lack of reliability." So they are going back to Windows. Those kinds of deals should be going to Unix on Intel.

We've got a good part of the solution [with OpenServer 6.0]. But it appears that we are going through this big death match for another few years now. I believe that the people we are competing against, even though they put out press releases to the contrary, know that we have intellectual property problems.

They are trying to mask those problems with massive PR campaigns. We are ready to fight it out, but there are probably other ways to go at this.

What do you mean?

In terms of the problems we have vis-à-vis Linux, if the other side would sit down and recognise what these problems are instead of just glossing over them, we would come to a resolution much quicker.

What would such a resolution look like?

We think we have been damaged pretty severely with respect to our intellectual property. One opportunity is for the people who are out there pushing Linux to sit down and work with us to see how we can get a resolution.

Short of that, we are set to go to the full conclusion. The case is not winding down, it is gearing up. In the meantime we are focused on enhancing and developing the next generation of Unix.