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Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First Stop
compactable writes "Just got back from the first half of the SCO roadshow's first stop in Toronto. No unfurling of IP, no NDA, however an interesting view of what's running this litigious blip of a corporation. Full details at my weenie write-up (feel free to mirror the contents so that my ISP doesn't kill me)."
FM: First Mirror :-)
http://farcaster.net/sco.html
It's great when they look at people's old operating systems and tell them how much they owe SCO.
"Well, this is running Linux kernel v2.0.3. You owe SCO $327. Please pay on your way out."
"This is nice, Linux 2.6 exerimental. You owe SCO a full $699, plux a future tax of 10%. Please pay on your way out."
Mention was also made in the road map of ... SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine).
...or the other thing? :)
Since it is SCO, should we assume that POS stands for "Point of Sale"...
Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
My favorite line, while not creative:
The 80's called, they want their features back.
heh...
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Sounds like I had more fun and got more concise and well presented information at that Timeshare seminar I went to. And I came out feeling far less ripped off, too.
Maybe SCO should take some lessons from Hilton?
Oh, wait, Hilton has an actual product to sell. Woops, my bad.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Notes from the SCO Road show
... it may be worth putting yourself on the list for future stops of the show ...
...
I decided to go to the SCO "City to City Tour" (%s/City to City/Farewell/g) out of morbid curiosity - what did SCO say about itself? I was especially interested to see if the time allotted to "roadmap" would even mention shippable product (o; It was interesting - not exactly as I expected, but interesting nonetheless. Highly recommended.
And apparently easy to attend. 64 seats, less than 20 attendees. Considering that when I applied I went to a waiting list, I was expecting a higher turnout
Grandest cheese at the presentation was VP of Marketing, Jeff Hunsaker. He started out with an hour the company's report card & backgrounder. Here's the view of SCO painted: 330 employees, 2+ million deployed units (no mention of OS breakdown - would be interesting to see what % of that is Caldera Linux), target market is small-ish business. Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented. Think Pizza Hut & Wallgreens (Arnold Clarke & Argos were UK references, Shoppers Drug thrown in for us Canuks). Nothing IT-intensive. Avaya & Lucent were mentioned on the laundry list, however no detail was given, and I cannot imagine descendants of AT&T paying too much to some guys in Utah for hideous product (searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group).
Oddly enough, market cap & stock price were mentioned extensively (who'd have thought?). Reference was made to using their capitalization as a means of acquisition; however no details were given (assuming there were any details to give). The fabled '2 quarters of profitability' was also mentioned. The name Caldera was dragged through the dirt, as they were never profitable. From the slides you'd think SCO had roots much, much deeper than the MS Xenix junk they spawned from. In fact, the analogy they whip out is that of Harley-Davidson (HD was purchased by AMF, went to hell, then arose re-branded as the mega-label you know today). I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners
Mention of the legal battle? Nothing technical. Representatives were up-front about their lack of legal knowledge, and inability to comment. It never got past the mud-slinging stage. Same old, same old. Their interest is in protecting their IP. This is about a breach of contract. Linux 2.4 code review shows Monterrey-esqe code relating to memory-access that must have come from AIX 5L. Caldera Linux customers are indemnified against legal action. Blah blah blah.
Interesting bits?
Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?). Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" (that'll be a keeper of an article). And heavy mention of HP's support. Reference was made to their web site removing their logo, however they emphatically associate SCOs current operations and HP's approval. Nothing to substantiate, however.
Really interesting bits?
The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers. And they were not too big on having a love in. Nothing hostile, however not one positive comment for the morning's session. During the "we be so profitable" section of the spiel, one reseller in the crowd asked "where does the money come from?" The response was largely a pointer to the SCO source initiative. The response? "What you are profitable in will not make me profitable.". Wow. That was good. One raised the points that this quibble is hurting his business. SCO's stance is that they'd love to settle this tomorrow
This is not possible with the exception of companies already owned by the Canopy group.
Any company has a fiduciary duty to their stockholders even privately owned.
Any company that accepted this POS (Not Point of Purchase) will open themselves to lawsuit. Any Due diligence will not pass muster.
There is nothing for the acuired company to be gained. The shares can not be sold, their non Legal business has all but disapeared so no synergy and the like can be had, Nothing as far as I can see.
Help fight continental drift.
Damn. I was interested in seeing the /. in real time... that's why I put a counter there ...
You generally haven't been able to short much of it because there are more people who want to short it than stocks in the brokerages. Most of the shares are owned by either the Canopy Group of a few other folks. The short interest is *insane* on that stock -- as in maybe 15% of the shares out on the open market and not covered by the Canopy Group and such have been short-sold.
Gentoo Sucks
Thank you!
I've been saying this all along: the worst thing that SCO for themselves could do is render the GPL invalid. They'd IMMEDIATELY open themselves up to a million lawsuits of death from irate copyright holders, a few of whom do have the money to kick the snot out of SCO (IBM, RedHat, and SGI come to mind).
"The GPL is invalid!"
"That so? Stop shipping my code. Now. I wrote that code, the copyright reverts to me."
"Uh, we own it! The GPL is invalid, and therefore, all GPL'd code belongs to us, because we said so!"
"I think not." (lawsuit filed)
Take that last line, multiply it by a million, and you'd see what would happen to SCO if the GPL was declared invalid. These people have honest-to-G-d, actual damages to claim. The GPL might die, but a dead SCO would be put right on top of its body.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Mention was also made in the road map of a new online update service (big whoop), and SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine). When did "you want fries with that?" become associated with the five 9's of reliability?
I know that a lot of IT workers are out of touch with the retail industry, but this seems a little arrogant.
Designing a stable, reliable point-of-sale system for long-term use (because retail corporations tend to replace POS systems on the order of once every twenty years) is a huge challenge. I'm involved with a project like that now.
Cash registers are where the money comes into a retail corporation. If they're broken because the designer figured that 80% reliability was good enough, then you don't take in money that day, or you use a notepad, pen, and manual credit card imprinter. A lot of your customers will walk out your door and down the street to someone who bought a better system.
The POS system we're replacing was bought in 1983. The servers are the size of washing machines and have 8.5" disk drives. They're still running. How many of you are working on systems you expect to last that long?
I'm not saying that SCO's system is any good, just that I've noticed a tendency for tech geeks not to understand why making a good POS system is a challenge, and something you'd want to mention as an achievement.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
> The best part of this whole thing is watching this poor guy's site counter shoot up. Was at 131 when I got there - now at 584 two minutes later. I'm watching the Slashdot effect in action in front of my own eyes!
Think how bad it would be if most of us actually read the articles before posting!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade