SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride has done it again.

With his uncanny knack for utterances designed to stick in the craw of the open source community, he told a tech audience at the Etre conference in Cannes this week that the current state of affairs, with open source proponents on one side of a gulch and proprietary companies on the other, was more like the "Wild West" than the world of 21st century software development. 

Other gems from McBride:

"Once you put something in digital form, it's easy to copy. My question for you is how are you going to respond if that happens to your IP?"

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"The open source movement says that proprietary software shouldn't exist. They say that the operating system should be free, but that's a slippery slope. There's 12 million developers worldwide, are you gonna let their work be free?"

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"We are under attack from what I call 'hurricane Linux'."

One is reminded at once of the kind of counterbalancing remarks made by, say, Linus Torvalds, over the years. One of the most memorable was:

"If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution."