More Criticism of SCO's Claims To UNIX

inc_x writes "GROKLAW has a compelling analysis that shows that SCO's claims that it owns the UNIX operating system are not very truthful. The Open Group confirms this position: "Statements that SCO "owns the UNIX operating system" or has "licensed UNIX to XYZ", are clearly inaccurate and misleading." It seems that SCO finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish facts from fiction. Last week SCO claimed 'This IP battle is only one part of SCO's business and is an add-on component. The core of SCO's business is profitable,' not bothered by the fact that they had claimed the opposite in their SEC filing: 'If we do not receive SCOsource licensing revenue in future quarters and our revenue from the sale of our operating system platform products and services continues to decline, we will need to further reduce operating expenses in order to maintain profitability or generate positive cash flow.'"

Comments

Re:Who buys the stocks anyways?

[Dunark]

Who buys the stocks that SCO "dump"?

Read the Friday August 29th page of Groklaw. There's a company called Integral Capital Management V that's bought enough recently that they had to file a 13G with the SEC. Curiously, shortly after they bought a big interest in Drugstore.com no long ago, a person by the name of Melinda French Gates was appointed to a seat on that company's board or directors. Hmmmm....

About their XFS claims...

[Anonymous Coward]

In this article "SCO's next target: SGI?"
(http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5072061.h tml), we find this gem:

In his August presentation, [SCO senior vice president Chris ] Sontag
said XFS in Linux includes 173 files and 119,130 lines of code that
infringe the company's intellectual property.

Oh reaaaaly?

Hm, how many lines are in Linux XFS?

[nobody@penguin xfs-kern-2.6.0]$ find . -name \*.[c,h] | xargs wc --lines
133482 total

Yay! SGI still owns 14,352 lines I guess.

Wait, but they said lines of code... strip comments & blank lines:

[nobody@penguin xfs-kern-2.6.0]$ find . -name \*.[c,h] | xargs stripcmt | grep -v ^$ | wc --lines
92618

So, they claim to own 26,512 more lines of code in Linux XFS than -actually exist- in the codebase.

From SCO's SEC Filing

[bernywork]

Yes, yes, this is the conspiracy theorist in me sure, but read this and make up your own mind.

" We initiated the SCOsource effort to review the status of these licensing and sublicensing agreements and to identify others in the industry that may be currently using our intellectual property without obtaining the necessary licenses. This effort resulted in the execution of two license agreements during the April 30, 2003 quarter. The first of these licenses was with a long-time licensee of the UNIX source code which is a major participant in the UNIX industry and was a "clean-up" license to cover items that were outside the scope of the initial license. The second license was to Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft") and covers Microsoft's UNIX compatibility products, subject to certain specified limitations. These license agreements are typical of those we expect to enter into with developers, manufacturers, and distributors of operating systems in that they are non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, paid up licenses to utilize the UNIX source code, including the right to sublicense that code.

The amount that we receive from any such licensee will generally depend on the license rights that the licensee previously held and the amount and level of our intellectual property the licensee desires to license. The two licensing agreements signed by us to date resulted in revenue of $8,250,000 during the quarter ended April 30, 2003, and provide for an aggregate of an additional $5,000,000 to be paid to us over the next three quarters. These contracts do not provide for any payments beyond 2003, except that Microsoft was granted the option to acquire expanded licensing rights, at its election, that would result in additional payments to us if exercised. In connection with the execution of the first license agreement, we granted a warrant to the licensee to purchase up to 210,000 shares of our common stock, for a period of five years, at a price of $1.83 per share. This warrant has been valued, using the Black-Scholes valuation method, at $500,000. Because the warrant was issued for no consideration, $500,000 of the license proceeds have been recorded as warrant outstanding and the license revenue associated with this arrangement has been reduced for the fair value of the warrant. "