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That and more sinister explanantions regarding the desires of the parent corp, The Canopy Group. Check out this report. While much is BS, it is interesting in what it says about Canopy. There is something to be said for your explanation as Yarro was fired. Though some deals were made between SCO and Microsoft.

Not going to happen. SCOX is thinly traded, meaning one or more big investors control the stock and therefore control the company. The largest block is owned by Canopy.

When this whole thing started, the prevailing thought was that SCO was attempting to induce IBM into buying them. It also seemed pretty clear that unless SCO had a slam dunk case, IBM would instead rely on it's fearsome legal department.

SCO hasn't come any where near a slam dunk. In fact, they haven't been able to get into the paint. And that's as far as my tired brain is going to work the basketball analogy for now.

Nice idea in theory, but as you said, most of the stock is held by a few hands, most notably The Canopy Group. The name Ralph Yarro might ring a few bells.

If SCO decides to drop the catch-22 game and focus on recouping damages from the people who donated the code improperly[*], I for one would be happy to examine their side of the story. They talk and talk and talk about how they want to fix this stuff, and they never ever make the slightest baby step toward following through. Accusations, innuendo, and vague references to "millions of lines of code" do not constitute working with the free software community to fix problems.

From a purely financial standpoint, SCOX is in a better position today than it was before it undertook it's current course. The stockprice, despite taking a beating, is still higher than it was before Darl took the helm. The company is flush with cash from the PIPE deals.

SCOX was dying. It's still dying, but it's managed to buy some time through some pretty outrageous maneuvers and complete loss of credibility. It's also made some insiders a lot of money.

The only way SCOX could possibly regain any credibility would be if they replaced their entire upper management and then dropped or settled their law suits. I say possibly, because even if they did these things, I doubt it would be enough. Oh, they'd still need a viable strategy going forward.

Mcbride's Thousand Year Reich is nearly at an end.

Assuming this is an accurate and actual letter, how is it that a company can continue to do business in this manner? This company is not in the softwrae business anymore - it's in the lawsuit business. After all the happenings with Enron and WorldCom, how is it that this company, which has no real business plan (that's evident even outside the letter) attract customers or money?

Along those lines, if their strategy is to just replace any real products with creative lawsuits and complex money raising schemes as described, perhaps people should replace the litigious bastards Google-bomb with "the Enron of Software" or "the next Enron" and start referring to them as such.

If that happened, I could see the mainstream press printing nice little asides like -- "...SCO and the Canopy Group are often described as "the next Enron" or the "Enron of Software" by members of the tech community..."

Maybe the litigiousbastards.com guys could buy up nextenron.com and enronofsoftware.com (unless SCO or Canopy already plan to as part of their positioning campaign!).

Me thinks they're probably having trouble with their random number generator in Unixware. Why doesn't someone drop Darl a line and suggest he try Linux. While you're at it maybe you could suggest that they sue Canopy Group. You could mention that they're the parent company that owns Caldera and that they're currently anticipating a $5 billion dollar influx from IBM. Since Darl is obviously looking for a big fish maybe he'll try this one.

thats not interesting or informative, its a troll. check your facts before modding posts like this up.

there stock price is going up, they will most likely make a profit and all for lying.
As I understand it, SCOX is basicaly owned by Canopy, and if you take a look at their website, you'll see a few companys that they own that are actualy making money by distributing, using, and offering supporting software for Linux, as appossed to SCOX which realy isn't with UNIX. So in the long run if SCOX wins, canopy, will probably lose more than they won.

Take a look here. TrollTech is one of their featured properties, on the front page (look at the icons, bottom row second left). Canopy certainly see TrollTech as one of their's.

Not to mention Trolltech is a Canopy Group company.

I think you mean Canopy, not Canopus.

You must be thinking of Canopy. Easy mistake though.

Blockwars: a free multiplayer game

He it Canopy's lead legal guy, and Canopy is a group that helps companies develop underperforming assets, and provides in-house legal counsel to their properties. Is this SCO strategy largely his idea?

I wondered if anyone knew more about him. I'm just curious out of a desire to at least identify who are the evil selfish greedy bastards of the world. But maybe he's not. Googling for him with keyword Utah returns a couple of addresses and phone numbers, but not much else...

> KDE is developed by nazi germans and therefore should be boycotted.

I think they're actually Neo-Nazi Americans?

...the privaty equity firm that is the controlling shareholder of SCO (I forget its name) managed to persuade another investor of the likelihood of a multimillior dollar settlement from big names.

The name you're looking for is the Canopy Group.

The /. crowd is generally unable to affect stock prices, but if we (a) start a campaign to hurt SCO sales and, even better (b) isolate the leading shareholders of SCO, figure out what other business interests they have, and boycott the whole lot of them, we're likely to have justice prevail.

Here's a list of the Canopy Group's portfolio companies, including some that should know better and might be encouraged put some pressure on their investors to stop this nonsense. Do you do business with these companies or recommend their products? If suing their partners and customers is just part of "the Canopy Way" should you or your company worry about litigation from them next? If you're an investor or employee and Canopy loses, should you worry about your stocks or your job? Maybe it's time to start the "reverse slashdot effect."

Altiris
Axiom Press
Center7/Inc.
Cerberian
Cogitoinc
Communitect
Data Crystal
Devicelogics
DirectPointe
Fat Pipe
Geolux
helius
homepipeline
iArchives
Industrial Training Zone
LearningOptics
Linux Network
luxul
MaxStream
Mi-Co
mti
MyFamily.com
Perimeter Labs
PlanetEarthTools
Power Innovations
SCO/Caldera
Trolltech
Tuglet
viawest
Wrenchhead

Since it is becoming more and more clear that Canopy is pulling the strings behind the SCO lawsuit, is it time, as a community, to put the heat on Canopy as a whole? Some of the other Canopy holdings are a bit of a surprise, given the direction SCO is going. Canopy happens to be big investors in Trolltech, the makers of QT. There's also some company named Linux Networx, a builder of Linux-based clusters. There are many other companies listed right on Canopy's web page. Perhaps some polite but strongly worded emails from Linux community members with relationships to these companies (e.g., KDE developers, etc.) might convince Canopy that their current direction will be detrimental to their larger business interests. Maybe it's even time to talk about a boycott of these companies' products. It's not like SCO and Canopy are playing clean here, after all. Thoughts?

Your company's website does almost nothing to explain what it is your company does. Did you use some sort of automatic business phrase generation program to create it?

"A dynamic operating company"

What the hell does that mean?

For those of you wondering what this whole SCO vs. Linux thing was about, I can finally reveal the truth.

As chairman and CEO of Canopy I've done a lot for the Open Source community. I've promoted investments in companies like Linux Networx, who make the third fastest supercomputer in the world and use Linux to do it. Companies like Lineo the masters of embedded Linux. Also Trolltech producing the incredible QT widget set used by the KDE project. And of course Caldera, producing the finest Linux distribution and pushing forwards the United Linux initiative.

But one shadow lay over my record of achievements. Despite all I had done for the Linux and Open Source communities, I still had never achieved the triumph I most desperately sought. Not once had an article I submitted been accepted by Slashdot :(

I'm sure my fellow Slashdotters can understand how this gnawed away at my soul.

Together with Darl McBride and David Boies I hatched a master plan, to achieve my dream of an accepted Slashdot article or to destroy Linux trying.

Caldera would purchase IP rights from the Santa Cruz Operation and with funding from Sun and Microsoft would use them as the springboard to launch a devastating legal and PR blitz against Linux. As part of this Darl would write a searing open letter to the Open Source community, drawing responses in return. One of these from Groklaw would give me the opportunity I needed...

As you can see everything has gone exactly to plan. I have my successful Slashdot submission, and I'm sure that looking back on it you can all see it was worth any 'collateral damage' along the way.

Darl, you can call off the dogs now.

God bless you all.

Ralphie

For those of you wondering what this whole SCO vs. Linux thing was about, I can finally reveal the truth.

As chairman and CEO of Canopy I've done a lot for the Open Source community. I've promoted investments in companies like Linux Networx, who make the third fastest supercomputer in the world and use Linux to do it. Companies like Lineo the masters of embedded Linux. Also Trolltech producing the incredible QT widget set used by the KDE project. And of course Caldera, producing the finest Linux distribution and pushing forwards the United Linux initiative.

But one shadow lay over my record of achievements. Despite all I had done for the Linux and Open Source communities, I still had never achieved the triumph I most desperately sought. Not once had an article I submitted been accepted by Slashdot :(

I'm sure my fellow Slashdotters can understand how this gnawed away at my soul.

Together with Darl McBride and David Boies I hatched a master plan, to achieve my dream of an accepted Slashdot article or to destroy Linux trying.

Caldera would purchase IP rights from the Santa Cruz Operation and with funding from Sun and Microsoft would use them as the springboard to launch a devastating legal and PR blitz against Linux. As part of this Darl would write a searing open letter to the Open Source community, drawing responses in return. One of these from Groklaw would give me the opportunity I needed...

As you can see everything has gone exactly to plan. I have my successful Slashdot submission, and I'm sure that looking back on it you can all see it was worth any 'collateral damage' along the way.

Darl, you can call off the dogs now.

God bless you all.

Ralphie

As some else mentioned, TrollTech is owned by the Canopy Group (look in the bottom left corner of the company's portfolio), the same group that owns SCO. If we buy this, do we still have to pay $699 to SCO?

I'm not a SCO supporter by any means, but these guys have a history of suing people and winning. I know we all asume that McBride is a moron, but what if he's actually clever. They could be "throwing" everyone off by making themselves look like idiots. Has it dawned on anyone that maybe the code snippets that were leaked were meant to be leaked? Perhaps they knew someone would be there with a camera and stick the pictures out on the Internet.

So while the community is thinking everything is just fine because SCO doesn't have jack, they are sitting on one or two really excellent examples of IP ownership they haven't released yet. This way when the code is released we will all be caught with our jaws gaping open and our feet stuffed into them. They are just down the street from me, I know some of these guys. They are slippery. The best way to kill a fox is not by chasing it.

Now maybe what they do have is small and can be replaced simply. That doesn't matter because on the phsycological front the open source / free software camp just took a hit. Unfortunatly it's too late to do anything about it.

I think a good approch is the "show us the code" approch. Not the "you must be an idiot smoking crack" approch. Hubris is a good thing when hacking code, but not when dealing with a bunch of lawyers. I urge a level headed course of action rather than a kick SCO's butt becuase there is no way we can be wrong action. Use caution - I promise there is an "Ace" up their sleave. Or at least a "Queen of Hearts". ;-)

And of course what the Gnome zealots won't tell you is that KDE is fully Canopy compliant. That's right, when SCO win their lawsuit it will be illgal to use GTK with their copyrighted Linux and everyone will have to convert to QT and KDE. Whereas if you'd been using KDE you'd know that you'd helped Canopy/Trolltech/SCO to achieve their historic victory.

Who the fuck uses Gnome anyway?

This poster is kwite right, KDE is the favored desktop for the Canopy Group and they own Linux. Support QT and Canopy. Gnome is piracy.

What makes you think that they would abuse it, whereas Gnome/Gtk-guys would not?

What are you talking about? Gnome and Gtk cannot strongarm commercial development, they have no power over commercial development. That's why Gtk uses the LGPL. That's why the LGPL exists.

As for the BSD'ing of Qt, as I read the FreeQt agreements, only the last "FreeQt" licensed version of Qt is BSD'd only when TT neglects Qt or goes bankrupt. There's nothing in there about BSD'ing the code after being taken over by a hostile interest and making commercial development impractical. This and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a 'FreeQt' licensed version of Qt in years.

Corporations only care about money. It doesn't matter who has control over commercial development under KDE, it's that one particular group does and they can do anything they want with it.

On that note, look who's next to SCO in the Canopy group: http://www.canopy.com/

Here's a link to the Canopy Group. This is hardly an overwhelming collection of companies.

My favorite is Planet Earth Tools. Oops! Make that SaberTooth Tools.

The idea that this collection of dopey companies is capable of mustering the resources for any anti-Linux conspiracy seems laughable.

Yes, SCO is a front for the Canopy Group, a "venture capital" firm founded by Ray Noorda and fronted by Ralph Yarrow. Their modus operendi is to sue the hell out of people. Unfortuneately, Troll Tech is tied up with them. Troll Tech makes linux products such as QT. Canopy openly owns a small number of shares. Granted, some people will score this post a troll by saying that only 6% does not mean control? However, Trolltech needs to let the Linux community know exactly what it's relationship to Canopy is. Do Canopy employees sit on the board? Do they share employees with Canopy group companies. Do they owe money to Canopy? Does Canopy or Canopy related people have special rights, like the right to buy more stock at a special price? Who controls "the Troll Tech Foundation". Do any of the "employees" that own a large chunk of the stock have agreements with Canopy?

Linux users should boycott all Canopy Group companies, including Troll Tech unless those comanies can demonstrate that they have a firewall between them and Canopy.

Trolltech, please come clean on this issue. You owe it to your users and potential customers.

Yes, SCO is a front for the Canopy Group, a "venture capital" firm founded by Ray Noorda and fronted by Ralph Yarrow. Their modus operendi is to sue the hell out of people. Unfortuneately, Troll Tech is tied up with them. Troll Tech makes linux products such as QT. Canopy openly owns a small number of shares. Granted, some people will score this post a troll by saying that only 6% does not mean control? However, Trolltech needs to let the Linux community know exactly what it's relationship to Canopy is. Do Canopy employees sit on the board? Do they share employees with Canopy group companies. Do they owe money to Canopy? Does Canopy or Canopy related people have special rights, like the right to buy more stock at a special price? Who controls "the Troll Tech Foundation". Do any of the "employees" that own a large chunk of the stock have agreements with Canopy?

Linux users should boycott all Canopy Group companies, including Troll Tech unless those comanies can demonstrate that they have a firewall between them and Canopy.

Trolltech, please come clean on this issue. You owe it to your users and potential customers.

The SCO's hosting facility (formerly known as Center7, later spun off as via west) is owned and operated by the Canopy Group. So if the attack is effecting the hosting company, then it is causing harm to SCO indirectly. CenterShift should choose a hosting company that isn't owned by SCO's parent company. If you click on the canopy group link you will see a few other choice companies you might want to choose NOT to do business with: Linux Networx, shame on you - But TrollTech, on the same page as SCO??? All you KDE guys out there might want to think about switching to Gnome, otherwise you are giving a SCO your support.

To all KDE Supporters - You know KDE uses Qt. Qt is made by TrollTech which has considerable participation from the Canopy Group (the puppet masters behind the SCOX soap opera, maybe themselves a puppet of someone else?).

Qt is GPL you say? Considering their stance of "the GPL is invalid", there is still a risk that the rug could be pulled out and leave KDE in a pretty serious quagmire. I certainly believe that this "GPL is invalid" assertments are pure crap but this risk needs to be very seriously considered before any attempt to make KDE the "standard" desktop.

Ralph Yarro is the real enemy. SCO is just the means to his evil. Ralph sits on the board and controls many of the the Canopy Groups companies. Look here for the various companies he controls/subsidizes/owns/sits on the board of . If you do business with them, let them know that this lawsuit is a bad idea. The way to get to Ralph is to hurt him in the pocket book. He just doesn't seem to understand logic. The way to make him understand is by showing him that we mean business.

Some of these subsidiary companies, by the way, are Linux/Open source whatever companies. He'll get the message real fast and call of the dogs if we just turn up the fire on his flank side.

Ralph Yarro is the real enemy. SCO is just the means to his evil. Ralph sits on the board and controls many of the the Canopy Groups companies. Look here for the various companies he controls/subsidizes/owns/sits on the board of . If you do business with them, let them know that this lawsuit is a bad idea. The way to get to Ralph is to hurt him in the pocket book. He just doesn't seem to understand logic. The way to make him understand is by showing him that we mean business.

Some of these subsidiary companies, by the way, are Linux/Open source whatever companies. He'll get the message real fast and call of the dogs if we just turn up the fire on his flank side.

... that Trolltech are part of the SCO empire/Canopy group:

The Canopy Group.

I've gone off using Qt since I found this out, and will be investigating other cross-platform toolkits, as much as it pains me to do so ...

Novell is not part of Canopy. The former founder of Novell started the Canopy group as a tech fund but Novell has nothing to do with Canopy these days. It is interesting to note that the Canopy groups home pages has a quote from Darl McBride and their latest news proclaims the termination of IBM's AIX license.

I've given this a lot of thought, and you know what. I'm with you. I used to be real positive on qt. A nice c++ cross-platform toolkit. But I'll never touch it. They're in the same boat as SCO. They're funed by the canopy group and are going to pull the same shit that SCO is pulling now with open source. I wouldn't doubt it if they claimed they owned KDE.

How about if they buy back the 4.1% of their stock from the Canopy group and the 1.6% of their stock from the SCO group so I don't have to feel dirty about using thier products. I know its a small percentage, and I do like QT, but still, it's unpleasant seeing their logo here.

I'll bet if they could they would buy that 5.7% back. And since its probably expensive to buy back, and Canopy and SCO likely don't want to sell its a pain and a source of fustration to TrollTech.

Interestingly, guess who is a major investor in Altiris? Check this out.

Maybe Kimball will be a bit more carefull this time round as he has already had part of one decision against a Canopy company overturned on appeal. He does seem clued up though.

See here for details on the Altiris case.

Peace and Karma...

They are buying the cluster from Linux Networx who are a Canopy Group company Like SCO. Perhaps Linux Networks customers are immune to the SCO claim. I think it would be interesting to ask them, and Canopy who obviously support the SCO claim.

If you check out the Nasdaq stock report for sco the following shareholders with >5% is shown:

Ralph Yarro
Darcy Mott
Canopy Group Inc
John Wall

If you then check out The Canopy Group website you will see the following as board members

Ralph Yarro - CEO & Presedent
Darcy Motto - Vice President, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer

This gives the Canopy group at least a 15% stake in SCO, possibly more.
If you look at SCO's board and then have a look at their share trading, you see the following:-

Charles BROUGHTON (VP world ops) sold about 120,000 USD worth of shares in the last two months
Robert BENCH (CFO) sold about 120K USD in last few months
Jeff HUNSAKER (s. VP)sold about 120K USD in last few months
Other than McBride (CEO) most of the board have ofloaded shares in the last month or two. To give you an idea of the "peak" of share selling. According to the Nasdaq the number of "insider" trades (i.e. board members) in the last 12 months was 15, and 12 (all of which were sales) of those were in the last 3 months (or as its know just after the Linux thing).

Yarro and Mott both also sit on the board of SCO.

Does that stink or is it just me?

Jaj

Back in April 25, 1994, PC Magazine had an article announcing that Novell Inc was developing a Linux based desktop system for Windows, DOS, NetWare, and Unix applications.

From that project, a group of Novell alumni formed Caldera Systems International with the backing of Novell's founder, Ray Noorda.

The Canopy Group, which purchased major holding in Caldera, was also founded by Ray Noorda.

Today Caldera Systems International, trading under the name The SCO GROUP Inc, at the direction of executives at the Canopy Group Inc, is threating the same target Linux desktop market for using the same technology that Novell owned and sublicensed to the original SCO.

From the SCO website:

"Caldera Systems, Inc. is a Canopy Group holding under the Ray Noorda/Canopy Group Investment Company. Ray Noorda is the former CEO of Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ:NOVL)"

And from the TrollTech site, you can see Canopy, along with SCO group own about 6% of trolltech too.

Take a look at the Canopy group main website and be sure to not patronize any of their other 20 or so "Portfolio Companies" like me.

Go to heck SCO and the VC you rode in on too.

Scary huh?

My understanding though is that Canopy has a relatively small stake in Trolltech, unlike SCO. I'd be curious to know what reason Canopy has for investing in a small software house with strong links to the open source movement. Call me suspicious, but "SCO" (Caldera) was, until a few months ago, a leading force behind a whole new Linux distribution (United Linux) and was making large quantities of sourcecode public.

I hope really Trolltech are run by honest, decent, managers who know what they're doing.

Who is Canopy (excuse my ignorance)?

"I should note that Ralph Yarrows, head of the Canopy group which owns 46% of SCO, was the one to organize the anti-protest and was the one who had the posters made."

Very interesting, considering Canopy owns a Linux clustering company, which supports Linux's use and even has a Linux BIOS product!

I didn't believe Trolltech was held by Canopy and so I went to Trolltech's site to prove you wrong. No mention of Canopy there. But I also went to Canopy's website and on their front page the list all groups in order with Trolltech in the lower right. *ack*

Considering Canopy owns 39 companies, I am a bit more concerned about the law suit. I'm sure these guys are quite aggressive (otherwise they wouldn't be where they are today).

Take a look at canopy.com and see if there are any other Canopy Group companies that are boycotable.

If you take a look on their homepage, you can spot TrollTech's Logo! What are the interests of these people in TrollTech and QT?

I don't think that claims that the Canopy Group is not behind this one will not hold up now.

Now my fellow "crunchies", (the insulting name M$ friendly Forbes gives us), for the million dollar question, where does this money trail lead? I'll bet it doesn't stop at the Canopy.

"The global demand for Linux-based Internet solutions is not only staggering â" but skyrocketing," said Ralph Yarro, president of the Canopy Group Investment Company. "Major solutions providers are under a great deal of pressure to provide a full range of Linux-based Internet solutions ranging from hand held devices to enterprise level connectivity. Leveraging the strength of Lineo in the embedded market will allow OpenLinux to scale to meet the needs of all business customers."