McBride's home phone has been crippled by incoming calls since Sunday, when the previously unlisted number and his home address were posted on popular technology Web site Slashdot.
It is understood that McBride and his wife have been relying on mobile phone service since the calls started rolling in. SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said the family had since received dozens of "obnoxious and sometimes malicious" phone calls
"Someone even had the gall to try and place a 'collect' prank call," said Stowell.
One reader of Slashdot, who claimed to have called the number, reported leaving a message for the McBride family:
"Sorry to say, but, you've been Slashdotted. Have a good Sunday."
Stowell would not say specifically whether McBride had increased security around his family home since its location was published on Slashdot but conceded that "Darl does at times arrange for personal protection by armed security."
When asked how McBride had reacted to the input from the callers, another spokesperson for SCO said:
"I dare say he probably wouldn't have answered any of them".
The assault on the SCO's Web site was instigated by the authors of the MyDoom.A virus, which was discovered on 26 February. The mass-mailing worm was designed to enlist thousands of infected Internet PCs to conduct a distributed denial of service attack on SCO's Web address.
A modified version of the virus targeting Microsoft appeared around three days later but it is widely believed that the primary attack on SCO was linked to the company's attempt to enforce copyright claims against popular open source operating system Linux.
SCO's claims are being articulated in a law suit against IBM in which it alleges Big Blue illegally placed proprietary Unix code into the open-source system.
Raising the ire of the Linux community, SCO is offering licences to commercial Linux users to ensure they do not infringe SCO's copyright. However open-source advocates have derided the little evidence that SCO has presented publicly to back its claims and are advising Linux users to ignore them.
While SCO has described the Web attack as a "nuisance and nothing more" the company has matched Microsoft in offering a $250,000 (£136,047) reward for information leading to the capture and prosecution of the MyDoom authors.
Talkback
What good does making personal attacks do?
It creates bad publicity, sympathy and if this goes to a jury trial, the LINUX community's 'character' will be dragged through the mud.
Let's leave it to the lawyers. We know that we are innocent and SCO are just doing this in a vain attempt to be taken over by IBM. The court case will not be helped by these infantile attacks.
Andy
I for one do not like the way SCO is handling it's IP rights. They have put too many eggs into one flimsy basket. But, I can not for the life of me understand the actions taken by the community's minority to attack Darl McBride and his family directly. The man is just that a man and has the same right to some privacy as the rest of us. He has enough on his plate right now agree or disagree with SCO's actions. He does not deserve to be attacked in his home. If you want to get him at work I have no problem with that. Darl can't stop Linux, has a failing product in SCO UNIX and Linux, and has lost much of the support he could have had if SCO would have just publically fixed the alledged code violations. Darl is the figure head and is paid to be so. He is not in this battle entirely by his own choice. Even if he suggested SCO's current course of action there is a group of investors that voted on it. Leave Darl McBride alone for the truth will come out in court and he wines and points his fingers enough without our antagonism.
Your statement about "previously unlisted" is not true
Every online white pages has this info
http://www.anywho.com/qry/wp_fap?lastname=mcbride&firstname=darl&city=&state=UT&zip=&btnsubmit.x=26&btnsubmit.y=12
Such methods are not acceptable!
But to some extent I think Darl only can blame himself.
He was the one who first resorted to bad behavior when he tried to win this case in the press instead of in the court.
The people in the Linux community usually feel strongly about IP and copyright law. Copyright law is even the foundation of their beloved GPL license. Most of them have no problem with SCO suing IBM in court, and they would most certainly remove anything that a court would find violatess SCO copyright. In fact SCO would probably not even have to go to court to have this done. A friendly letter would have bin sufficient.
But so far the only lawsuits SCO has filed is aboud breach of contract and trade secret violations against IBM, and slander of title against Novell as Novell as they have registered the copyright to the SysV codebase SCO claims to own. That is SCO have no copyright case going yet they threaten end user with copyright suit if they don't pay up. This is even more funny since the ones that is responsible for copyright violations would have bin Linux distributers like Red Hat that do the copying, not end users. Provided there actually was any SCO copyright violated and this seams more and more improbable.
In the beginning it was millions of lines that was problematic, when SCO gives examples at their annual sales show, it turns out that they are in the clear.
Nobody seams to be able to find the MIT experts that analyzed the code. And lately SCO have changed their mind and it is evidently only 63 files that they find problematic. In realty they are only 9 files as they basicly do the same thing but for different processor architectures. The files in question is header files containing things like error numbers. It is very questionable if they are copyrightable in the first place. And even if they were, SCO was part of making them part of the Linux Standard base, and as such released them under GPL.
So the people who released Darls phone number is certainly not the only bad boys in this affair. And they were certainly not the first to misbehave. Anyway the behavior from both parties are unacceptable
Unfortunately the courts tend to rule by scripture, not common sense.
If the lawyers can argue their case and refer to some obscure law, taken completely out of context, the court will rule in their favour, no matter how pathetic the case is or how poorly the law was defined.
Just look at the millions of cases of consumers suing companies because they hurt themselves with the company's product in their own stupidity and misuse. Or families of deceased drunk drivers suing the bar because the staff doesn't consist of an entire army of ninjas ready to jump out and detain every patron who's had a little too much to drink. But I digress.
There was a case back in the 80's where the makers of AutoDesk were sued by some guy who claims to have held a patent on the XOR operator. Sure enough, if you look through the US Patent Office archives, there was a patent approved for XOR. Regardless of how asanine the case was, AutoDesk had to pay I think $25,000 US (back in the early 80's, mind you!) because the scriptures said this other guy owned XOR.
So while attacking McBride's family might not help IBM successfully defend themselves, it should (hopefully) put out a message for other corporations to not grasp for pathetic lawsuits like SCO is trying to do.
Essentially, corporations are faced with a choice: try to win some extra $$$ in a less-than-honest (but unfortunately still legal) court case, or leave the petty stuff alone and not have to worry about an angry outlash from the public.
Being the CEO, McBride has the power to decide SCO's choice of action. And sure, there's a different between business and family. But the man with a wife and home is also the same man who's enraging the rest of the public. There's no doubt that when he goes to the office to work in the morning, last night's harassing phone calls throughout the evening will still be on his mind!
I'll bet my balls that even if SCO wins, the amount of time and $$$ invested in controlling every single virus attack that breaks out and dealing with all the SCO-slander (including the decline of sales from bad publicity), will me more than the amount of $$$ they would win from their court case.
McBride, are you listening?