Slashdot Mirror
SCO - What have WE Forgotten?
"Over the last eight months I have read countless posts on Slashdot regarding SCO and most if not all of the posts view the scene with rose-tinted spectacles. Promises are made that SCO will be buried and that McBride will find himself in prison, yet they are still there and McBride is still in charge. The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools and something unknown to Slashdot readers made the SCO stock price rise by 2.4%, on December 26th, over half a days trading. If someone buys a stock they expect the price to rise, so what have WE forgotten that could be good news for SCO investors? The principle of 'many eyes' has been used by the Open Source movement before. Thousands of people examine source code, submit patches, and ensure that we give the best software we can to the community at large. Bugs are announced and fixed within hours and all of us know that this methodology provides a better solution than that offered by closed source products. We now need to apply the same methodology to the SCO problem, all of us need to consider what we know about this sorry affair and how we can legally contribute to the downfall of the SCO Group.
SCO have been ordered to produce their evidence against IBM by midnight on January 11th, 2004. This gives us [five days] to make sure that when the IBM lawyer marches into court he has a spring in his step, knowing that he has every Linux user on the planet behind him. THEN we can talk about SCO being buried, but not before.
Thank you for your time and a Happy New Year."
Trouble is, you can also find 100 investments that looked just like the great bargain-basement opportunities, but went from low-valued to zero-valued during the same year. Nobody knows for sure which ones are which until after the fact. Some people are better at guessing than others; those people go on to be successful mutual fund managers, but even the successful ones get it wrong a lot of the time. They keep making money because they have their funds spread out over a lot of stocks, not because they have crystal balls in their closets.
Here's an interesting fact: Very few stock funds, even the successful ones, outperform market indexes over the long term. Lots of high-profile funds do really well for a year or five but then have a lousy year or two and lose all their gains relative to the market as a whole.
If you want to build wealth trading stock in public companies, history says the most successful strategy is to buy a wide, diverse portfolio. Keep buying into it over time, whether the market is up or down ("dollar cost averaging.") Then ignore the people who happen to get lucky on a particular stock pick -- because you know if you try to do that, you're much more likely to end up broke than rich.
Besides, the SCO might get somewhere. After all, they've got Sen. Orrin Hatch (R. Utah) looking out after them. He's got to keep his son employed somehow.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
"Deep dea diver"
yeh, when I grow up I want to dive into deep dea.
I personally find it hard to believe that there are NO skeletons in the Linux kernel closet. That is perhaps one of the advantages of closed source. Deeper closets...
SCO. What is it all about... is it good, or is it whack?
that this whole SCO thing is a lot like the .com fiasco. The craze may still be pumping those stocks, but we all know it's eventually going to burst. This is no different.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
-- Cheers,
-- RLJ
yup...groklaw
You're assuming that stock prices reflect the "value" of a company - they don't. Investors aren't often all that smart and a bit of media buzz is often enough to make them invest. Media buzz != sound financial investment.
The fact that SCO is listing higher is an indictment on the mentality of investors not a reflection of the soundness of their legal case.
It doesn't mean anybody has 'missed' anything, just that the people that invest in SCO are not doing so based on the technical or legal merits of its lawsuit.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i did'nt understand a word you just said, something about never forgetting?, what is the point in this article, something about the sco case against linux, some piece of evidence we've forgotten???
http://www.thebesttrek.net/forum/index.php - visit my FORUM
That valuation is probably reflective of the $64 million in cash SCO got from a VC firm. The rest of the valuation doesn't make sense in terms of revenue and outlook, though.
to short 1000 shares of SCOX...Thanks for the reminder!
WTF? Over?
fp
Come now, the stock market is legalized gambling these days. It's a nice easy way to invest in a company. Investments are risks. The stock buyers are taking the risk that SCO is successful. I mean, what if they were? Certainly their stock would be worth probably what? 1000x current with actual Linux licensing fees?
Hell, do you know anyone who wouldn't take 1000 to 1 odds when the American legal system is involved?
There are alot of suckers out ther buying SCO stock. Eventually the house of cards will crumble and alot of people will be left losing their life's savings.
In many cases (especially with tech stocks), stock price has *nothing* to do with how well or badly a company is doing. In fact, if a company gets a lot of press, which SCO has, it often causes a lot of people to buy the stock, which in turn causes the stock price to go up. Was there really any good reason to be investing in the company? Probably not. Another example of an over-inflated tech stock, that will probably crash like so many other have.
That Sco is a for profit company and that the American legal system has little relation to what is right and wrong. If SCO didn't think they could make a profit off suing Linux users they would not. Also as a business they must have some sort of legal argument as I have NEVER seen a business go into a PUBLIC legal battle with nothing but smoke an mirrors.
Beware, sco may yet win!
to check Post Anonymously.
Or the Preview button.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Oh god, I love when you talk like that. Rub my clammy nipples!
We have forgotten to be humble.
We have forgotten not to act like those who we dislike.
We have forgotten to take the high road.
And this includes letters and statement from leaders in the community, as much as ACs on Slashdot.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
First off, wonderful submission. It's well-written, well-meaning, and helpful.
t han-we-do dept.', the implication is that things work differently in the stock market. That's sort of the case, but not entirely.
Now, are things different on Wall Street?
I trade stocks for a living. Some of it is daytrading. from the category Cliff chose, 'from the daytraders-and-lawyers-live-on-different-planets-
The key issue here is potential; *if* SCO wins, it'll win $3B plus leverage vs every single linux user (if collectable, $699/installation for single-cpu installations, more for more processors; also $39(?) per embedded device). The payoff is huge and Wall Street functions on potential and leverage.
What does this imply (or explain) about SCOX and said stock price?
I once read an insightful quip in an investment article about SCO; the quip was 'Buying SCOX is like buying a lottery ticket'. Meaning, there's a huge potential payoff but, chances are, you'll get nothing. The SCOX stock price, hence, is an average of the perception of those two extremes.
2 years from now, SCOX will either be worth $100+/share or $0/share.
In conclusion, the rising stock price is a function of Wall Street's perception of the odds of this lottery ticket.
RD
Actually, they've been ordered to state their complaints against IBM; evidence comes later.
Also, their deadline isn't midnight the 11th: as with all such legal matters, it's COB (17:00 local) on the deadline or the first Court day (the 12th) following it. The Clerk of the Court's receipt of the response is the magic timestamp, and the Clerk isn't going to wait up to midnight on a Sunday in the hopes that soon Darl will be there.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Even if SCO pulls out some dramatic legal problem with linux, it can be worked around.
The great thing about the open source movement is its agility under pressure. When there's nothing making it move, its agility-- on things like, say, -- drops to zero, but when things HAVE to happen, they can happen blindingly quick. If SCO does in fact have some real proof of some legal issue hidden somewhere-- unlikely, because if they had it they probably would have played it by now-- I'm convinced the Linux community will find some way to resolve the legal issue and keep going without so much as a hiccup.
If such a thing arises, then is the time to worry about it. Until indications such a thing exists, though, there is nothing that can be done to prepare, so I can't see paying much thought to it.
So all we're we're mostly forgetting here-- though I've heard it on slashdot a lot-- is that SCO doesn't have to win to win. All SCO has to do is drag things out. In the end, SCO will lose the case and fade into bankruptcy.
What we're forgetting is that having lost and faded, the SCO execs will walk away rich from stock sales and laughing. Meanwhile, the over a year of SCO propaganda will have sunk deep into the heads of execs everywhere and will not come out easily, since the kinds of publications executives read will have reprinted SCOs initial, easy-to-grasp-without-thinking allegations vertabrim, but then probably once the truth comes out won't cover it at all since it's much messier and harder to write into a quick dramatic story. This is all we have to be afraid of, I think.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools and something unknown to Slashdot readers made the SCO stock price rise by 2.4%, on December 26th, over half a days trading. If someone buys a stock they expect the price to rise, so what have WE forgotten that could be good news for SCO investors?
Apart from what could be genuine and valid concerns about the SCO case, the meteoric rise of VA Linux stock to approximately 254 points on the day of the IPO clearly shows that the people who play the markets are quite seldom wise.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
Are we sure this story isn't an SCO plant to spread FUD?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
It's on the bedroom door. It asks "Did you forget your pants?"
So far, so good. Seems to be working.
If you post it, they will read.
1) Legal wrangling always has some uncertainty involved. If SCO has a 10% chance of winning the case, they get $1 billion. A 2 Billion billion dollar settlment times .1 is 200 Million, which is around
their market cap.
2) Let say that investors fall into 2 categories, people of the opinion that SCO will win, and people who are of the opinion that SCO will lose.
The first set buy SCO stock, thinking their investment will pay of 10x. If they're wrong, they'll lose the investment. The second class of investors have to short sell the stock, especially since options don't seem to be available.
The second class of investors have a much worse situation. They can double their money, but if SCO wins, they could lose a great deal of money, in theory there's no limit. What's worse is that if there's a legal victory, the stock is likely to spike, making the possibility of cutting your losses before they get too bad difficult. The current trend is also discouraging. The stock has been slowly gaining value over the months. This would mean a short seller will have to keep pumping money into their initial investment, waiting for the moment when SCO's stock crashes.
If you fall into the second camp, I think the risk is just to vast and the payout too far away for people to jump on.
OTOH, buying puts looks like a much better deal, but they don't seem to be availible.
You state that given a investment in SCO at the right time you would have made alot of money. That leads us to the point that before the rise in price they where a good investment. It has nothing to do with if they are right or wrong. As a investor you would look at the situation and try to estimate how many people are going to buy and how this is going to effect the price. If I buy and everyone else does after me then guess what, I just made a bunch of money. Hell most investors could care less what the companies name even is as long as the deal results in a gain.
Got Code?
Even if SCO's impossible claims of massive kernel copying prove to be true, they still have to prove that they own sufficient rights to UNIX, which Novell still disputes.
The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAJKJKSJSAKJDSKJKJFK
How am I supposed to take anything else written in this essay seriously?
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Sirius (SIRI) - it's nearly doubled in the past couple weeks. Buy SIRI so my shares will continue to go up!
Everyone's forgotten what SCO is actually suing IBM for. It's not copyright violation. It's not patent violations. It's a contract violation.
The crux of the matter, as I understand it, is that SCO is claiming that the SystemV contract specifies that they retain control over everything developed for SysV Unix -- regardless of who actually does the development. If you want to kick this back into copyright law (which is likely to become relevant), then they're saying that whatever you made is a derivative work. Even though you may license the SysV code it doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with derivative works.
There's a shitload of smokescreening going on, and SCO has made some really amazingly stupid claims (mostly their execs, not their lawyers, although the lawyers have made some stupid claims as well), but it really does get back to this -- is SCO's read on the contract the proper one? It's not a cut and dried answer. The contracts are very old, have passed through many hands, and have several court cases associated with them. The wording isn't clear either.
Personally, I still think SCO's smoking a big crack rock -- their interpretation of the contract is overly broad and utterly insane. But IANAL.
A coworker (ok... technically my boss) asked me yesterday when I expected the lawsuit to be resolved. I immediately replied 5-10 years.
Anyone who thinks that this is going to be finished before then is smoking one right along with SCO.
one thing that is to be noted is that no matter how hard open source has been attacked especially *nix in the recent SCO crap, the community I have witnessed has banded together and become a unified place to work, weather or not SCO wins this they will not stop the opensource community, there may come a time when it is frowned upon to use Linux but I know that there will always be people who use it and are proud of it. Raise your fist in the air Opensource, one thing that power to the people also delivers is the ability to speak up and deny those who are doing wrong the ability to do so anymore, this may sound really cheesy but its true people need to be made aware of exactly how great the open source community is and what it has provided and what will happen if one of its keystones is ripped away by a company only out to gain for itself and no one else.
You have been sig'd
You should say "Locked Closets." OSS is at least available to be vetted. If there are skeletons (pardon me while I hum some Anthrax), then they will be found and removed.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
To pay your $699 licensing fees!
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
The rise in SCO stocks may a gamble on the part of investors that SCO will be bought out by a larger company. Given the stock price, it may be a good bet. Personally, I'd rather bury my money in the back yard.
if I had invested my life savings in SCO stock last Christmas I would now be a multi-millionaire
Haha - what a loser. I only missed out on the chance to be a multi-thousandaire.
>...knowing that he has every Linux user on the planet behind him
Not trying to troll, but I think that even if a small % of Windows users would support SCO, it would be still much more ppl than all Linux users combined.
Look at how fast SCO execs (the people with the real knowledge of how good their case is) were DUMPING their stocks.
Lots of people buying stocks are fools. Look at how many of them lost money during the "dot com boom".
An increase in stock should show pretty solid motive. The knew accusing IBM and Linux would have this effect. In the world of media any press is good press. SCO was on it's last leg and the officers of the company needed something to seal assets. Many of them have made future sell plans of their stock, and my guess is so they can exit stage right. If everyone on wallstreet is so savvy for this kind of thing, well I will take anyones money for my stock in enron.
The main problem in the next year is the environment that the SCO/IBM case will play out in. If you're rooting for SCO, vote for Bush.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It is not very far-fetched to assume that SCO's tactics have been almost solely targetted at boosting their shareholder value. This year might be different however. If SCO doesn't come up with concrete irrefutable evidence to support their claims they might end up hurting the very shareholders they have been trying to appease.
Unless...they get taken over by some bigger company with an eye on the pie they have baking...
What I'm trying to get at is that with a market capitalization of merely 250 million and with the intellecual property claims they are making they are begging for IBM or (maybe even) Microsoft to buy them out.
Far fetched? Probably. But imagine if the SEC & the European regulators were to allow such a thing to happen?
(just remember where you heard it first)
You can still make money off of SCO's stock price climb if you take a big risk.
Short their stock.
The truth has a way of shaking out, and when the current SCO hype is undone and the price plumets to a fair value, you will cover your short and buy a speedboat or two (I like Donzi).
I do not often short stocks, prefering to avoid the risk, but in this case...
Invest at your own risk.
~8^]
It's pretty simple. The value of a stock is not directly tied (well, except perhaps via dividends or a company actually dissolving) to how well a company is doing. The only thing that matters is predicting what other people will do before they do it. In this case, a lot of people bought SCOX. As long as traders manage to divest themselves of SCOX shares before SCOX actually goes under, it doesn't matter whether SCOX is doing poorly as a company.
Folks who sold SCOX short can just wait until SCOX goes under.
While free markets make a lot of sense, capitalism (the investing of funds in companies, at least in its modern form) has too much tendancy to cause splits between the interest of a company and the interest of its management.
May we never see th
Because, in this situation, it is SCO that is on dangerous grounds (or, to extend the metaphore, "dangerous waters"), not the other way around. We the Open Source community had no intention of doing anybody in - until SCO raised its middle finger and poked IBM in the eye. This really is a question that SCO ought to ask itself (or should have asked itself) before blasting away at Linus & Co.
/.'ed today), there were curious figures of SCO's financial performance this past year. It seems to me that, were it not for the $50 million infusion of badly needed cash, SCO would in fact be doing a lot worse in 2003.
On the other hand, the OP did raise some interesting points about various signs that suggest that SCO may not be on its way out - yet. In an earlier article from ComputerWeek (already
(By the way, I hope we are on a general path of righting the wrongs committed by SCO, not squashing it like a bug. Doing so may set precedences that none of us will be prepared to face someday.)
Anyone who has been paying attention to the markets for more than 6 months knows the market is full of fools. That's not to say there is nothing to the rise of the stock price but it is quite likely the fools are driving the price up, not the wise investors.
Were I a gambling man, I'd be shorting that stock.
Dude, first lax then relax. Remember, SCO is evil, but it is the evil of banality, not some eternal, overreaching darkness, m'kay? The way this post goes you'd think that if Linux fell then the next thing we'd all see is some shot of space with letters fading into the distance:
EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE --- It is a time of rebellion. The Great Operating System, Linux, fell to the evil machinations of the Dark Lord of the Sys, Lord SCO ...
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I think the SCO exec are misleading investors. You can see it with their FUD releases which claim one thing after another. While we see these for their true value, investors might not have the same perspective. They see one company suing another huge company for a lot of cash and is claiming ownership over parts of a widely used kernel/os.
With the lawsuit and the recent injection of venture capital, plus the latest financial reports saying their licensing drive is making money *but* they spent it on lawyers, I think the investors are keeping the stock until after SCO has to show their cards. If you see a stock jump from $1 to $20 at the high and is now at $10 with more news to come, might you not atleast *consider* paying the $10 per share incase they do have a legitimate claim against Linux which then pushes their stock way above $20.
Unfortunately this, to us, looks like a pump and dump (as shown by sco execs) but the SEC probably wont investigate until after the lawsuit is settled/dismissed/whatever and the outcome of it wont be quick. By that time I assume Darl and friends will be long gone to Soviet Russia/Cuba.
Just a thought, oh and IANAI (I am not an investor)
Natalie Portman.... Yummy... I could wipe mayonaise all over here and eat her like an eggroll...
Remember BRE-X?
9 7. htm
http://geology.about.com/cs/mineralogy/a/aa0420
You could have made a mint on it if you bought in at the right time. The stock went into the $200 plus range, then became worthless over a period of a week.
History repeats itself.
My rights don't need management.
Lets say there's a 2% chance of this whole SCO thing working. This means there's a 98% chance that SCO's worth $0.28, and a 2% chance its worth an obscene amount.
So the valuation should be:
(0.98 x $0.28) + (0.02 x an obscene amount)
which could still be a big number.
to cite, not to site
This gives us [five days] to make sure that when the IBM lawyer marches into court he has a spring in his step,
Isn't have the research before walking into court the job of the IBM lawyers? Why should the IBM lawyers profit from your free research? Is that not the same idea behind the thinking 'Use the GPL so no company can make money off [my] code'?
? - Who are the primary market makers in SCO?
Also, SCO is a thinly traded stock with most of the stock held by insiders and institutional investors. As a result, there are not that many shares available for trading by the general public. It is easy for insiders to manipulate the stock prices and any buy or sell of 10,000 or 20,000 shares (not that many in the grand scheme of things) can cause a large swing in the price of the stock.
while the stock ticks up, would this be a good time to sell short over the next several months? say, buy at 16 or 17 and sell short at 8 or 10? not sure how far apart you can spread the selling short, but if it is doomed to fall, so will the stock and this might bring dollars to the table.
Mark my words! After SCO gets slapped around in court, Darl & Co. dumps their shares, SCO's stock price plummets, and stakeholders get all pissed off, this will end up one of the worst (and most publicized) corporate scams in recent memory.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
The investments are not based on anything real. But you're right, if you get in early and cash out before it crashes, you can make a lot of money. The problem os its very difficult to know when the tide will turn. And if you're late you lose.
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
keep in mind the technology is the dog, the stock market is the tail. With regards to tech companies at least. If what your saying is right both companies above would be kick of the NASDAQ right now. however the lack of recourses, R&D, bad decisions have cought up with them and what are the stocks worth. Allegience was worth $40 plus not is just below ten cents.
You know, after reading this post I was shocked. I don't track SCO at all, and I don't follow the case, but I assumed from all the derisive posts I'd read here that SCO's stock was in the dumper. I wonder if that's revealing.
/. Just because we want something to be true does not make it so.
The parent invokes the "many eyes" image as if that will necessarily mean SCO's downfall. But the parent implicitly acknowledges is that there are ALSO "many eyes" - in the market - actually, make that "many many eyes" that are scrutinizing the case and that seem to be voting that they believe there IS merit to the case.
There's several possibilities here, one is that the smart money's just playing up the price until every-day-joe jumps in and buys, at which point the smart money will dump it. Given the length and depth of SCO's rally, I think this seems unlikely (but I've been wrong many times before).
Another possibility is that maybe - just maybe - the market knows more than Slashdot zealots know - or will let themselves admit. Maybe a lot more companies than we know are paying SCO's licensing fees. IANAL, but maybe their case has much more merit than you would guess from reading
A third possibility is that SCO's price rise is just an unhappy coincidence completely unrelated to the legal action. Who knows, maybe the case will fall flat on its face and SCO will go in the crapper as so often predicted here. The market has been wrong many times before.
But one thing is clear, you can't get a good sense of what is going on by reading the opinions of chauvinists - like, say, here or on any of the forums populated by people who've gotten rich or hope to get rich holding SCO.
1) Linux is being attacked by SCO.
2) SCO is funded by purchases and investments
from Microsoft.
3) Microsoft owns John Ashcroft's Department
of Justice and various lobbying groups like
Harris Miller's ITAA.
4) Linux does not have lobbyists in Washington
nor "friends" in the courts.
We? Who the hell is "we"?
Believe me, the people who have a real financial stake in this couldn't care less what "we" have thought of. For The Community, this has been an opportunity to rant, preen, write Open Letters and generally engage in communal hallucination about how "we" are bravely facing down some sort of Tolkien-ish adversary. And, of course, giving SCO endless free publicity and credibility, which is what they counted on in the first place.
IBM's lawyers didn't win a war of attrition with the US government by counting on a bunch of self-important, pimply nerds to cover their bases, and they're not counting on you here. The only ones counting on you are SCO execs hoping you'll keep stirring the pot.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Any time a stock gets attention of non-StockNerds, you're going to see this type of thing happen.
The odds of SCO coming out on top are low, but the stakes are high. So, as others have more eloquently pointed out, the 'hype & greed' factors are kicking in to drive the price up. Everyone wants to kick in a couple of bucks in case the under-dog wins. (Don't for a *moment* confuse right and wrong with the opportunity to make a buck -- bad mistake.)
You saw the same non-StockNerd action with RedHat, and you'll see it again w/ the Google IPL. Quite predictable really...
Lots of smart investors shorted Iomega, realizing that their story could not be sustained in the long run. They waited and waited for the price to drop, which by all reasonable accounts it should have. It didn't, and at least one firm folded because of their large short position in the company. By the time it did fall, lots of others made their cash and ran. The moral of the story is that the stock market follows a different set of rules which has little to do with what a company should be worth, but rather is determined by its market buzz. It's all about perception, and by that measure, SCOX has hit all the right buttons. It will undoubtedly fall, but knowing when, that's the key. Hint: note when McBride cashes out.
implosion. Nuff said.
Stocks are NOT the company, and many people forget that.
.. perhaps purchased when the stock was at 4 or 5 or 10 dollars a share.
Large institutions may have been holding several hundred thousand (or even millions) of dollars of SCO stock
It is to these companies advantage to BUY MORE stock to drive the price up so that they can sell it for a largeer profit even if they take a loss on some percentage of shares.
Everyone knows SCO is a dying bird. But that doesn't mean that the stock is automatically worthless.
Right now with the stock hovering around $17 a share is actually not a bad time to BUY. Large institutional purchases will probably drive this stock up to 20 or so at least one more time before the real sell-off begins.
Until now SCO has really only made a vague set of claims against Linux. What details they might have have been made privately without any real means to verify them. In this way SCO has been very successful in making it seem like there has actually been some sort of substantive dispute between SCO and Linux over the past year when really it has just been posturing. Soon we may see some real specific claims from SCO that can be acted upon and disputed, but until then this is just a marketing campaign. Any company that gets a notice from SCO in the mail should send back a reply telling them to substantiate their claims and if they actually get a response they should then publish it publically.
Keep in mind that they are suing for billions of dollars in damages and annual license fees that would total at a minium hundreds of millions more each year. Note that even with the stock price increasing to about $18/share, and counting significant potential dilution, if they win, the comapny only has about 16 million potential shares outthere. This gives a current potential value of roughly $300 million. If they were to win lock stock and barrel the company would be worth significantly more. The value lies in how big the licensing stream is worth. I think Barron's recently put it at around $3 billion. Currently the market is giving them about a 10% chance of collecting, if you believe in effecient markets, don't hold your breath on this one (current value=chance of winning*value if they win).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
but they do smell blood. seriously, after all of the dot com fiascos, we have plenty of people with more money than brains running around the stock market. but if they can buy the right judges, Linux could be doomed.
I believe timing is even more critical than usual when shorting shares - that's because you are essentially borrowing shares to then return then after the stock drops in price. Thus far the SCO thing has really dragged on, so even if you were right in the long-term, the short strategy probably wouldn't work unless you predict with some certainty the exact moment of SCO's ultimate demise.
Of course SCO is manipulating the market, and some already have made money or will.
... watch the stock go down the toilet in a matter of hours if not seconds.
But for those waiting for the big payoff, those who've bought SCOX and are just waiting for the promised land.. when the judgment day comes
Nobody will be able to sell it because nobody will buy it.
No we're not forgetting anything, Linux overall, is a good thing. Like PJ says, if there's any infraction in the Linux 2.4 source code, it'll be fixed instantly and the world will move on.
Five years from now we'll hardly remember anything about SCO, other than some unscrupulous people and a temporary barratry business model which took a couple of years to be proven wrong.
If you go to a horse race, and you see a horse has million to one odds, it makes sense to put a little money on it. Even if it has 3 legs and a blind jockey named Darl. You put a hundred bucks on it, and if it wins, you can start to afford to play poker with Bill and Larry. You /know/ you're throwing your money down the toilet, but the potential payoff is huge.
Now say that horse is a stock, as more people buy in, it costs a bit more to place the bet, but it's still a bargain at 200,000 to one payoff. IF it wins.
If SCO wins, it will be a bit like that, $3bn from IBM, and really, the sky will be the limit for licensing. It's not gonna happen (even if IBM loses, they could tie it up forever and eventually the 'offending' code could be dealt with), but for people who manage money, it's irrelevant. The investment is still proportional to the payoff.
This is not strictly speaking a pump and dump. I call what SCO is doing "pump and squeeze". SCO is very thinly traded. That means most shares of SCOX are held by insiders and institutional funds. Only a small amount of stock is being sold on the open market. Small buys and sells of the stock move its price wildly. This means SCO can't just dump their shares on the market and make a killing. The price would drop too rapidly for them to move it all at a good price. What insiders can do is register planned sales of stock with the SEC and time their press releases to shortly proceed those sales. This allows them move chunks of stock at the high rate. Anytime the price dips too low for public consumption or a planned sale, they can make another outrageous announcement and pump it back up. The longer they have to unload their stock, the better this works. This is why they do everything humanly possible to delay the IBM and RedHat suits. Either one of those coming to a quick finish would destroy the pump before it finishes extracting money from the market.
They can also use the paper value of the stock as collateral to buy things. This seemed to work best by their buying Vultus (another Canopy Group company). In this way, they can allow the Canopy Group to show real profits with real money even though its really the Canopy Group shuffling things around. It would be risky for them to acquire outside companies this way since it would expose their scheme to more parties who either want their cut or sue them as well.
The high stock price can be partly attributed to the fact that the investing world is only now starting to understand that SCOX is full of it.
If you've read groklaw at all, you'll notice two things. One, that most of what SCO has been doing, in and out of the court, indicates that they are goign to lose bigtime. This includes debunking much of their claims, when they even bother to make any. The other thing you'll notice is that many readers complain about how the investing press seems to think SCO is going to win this and make piles of cash.
The second factor, however, is significant. I was thinking about short selling SCO's stock, however after reading a little bit about shorting and looking at the numbers, i decided not to. Why? I still think SCO is going to (eventually) tank when IBM bitchslaps them down, however it seems a lot of other people are betting on this.
According to fortune's stock quotes, SCO has 13.8M shares outstanding, with short interest at 2,057,561. That's a short interest of almost 15%, which is HIGH. (A "normal" short interest is usually no more than 2-3%.) So, there is a significant portion of the investing world that things SCOX is going to tank.
The problem, though, is that high short interest actually helps keep the price up. Why? Well, remember that shorting is 'sell high, buy low', in that order. When you short a stock, you 'sell' it, agreeing to buy it again in the future, with the expectation that it will go down. When a lot of people do this, however, the market reacts with an increased price, because the market knows that a lot of people are now obligated to buy it - in other words, demand for the stock is high. This is why it is dangerous to short a stock that everybody else is shorting.
I think the core of the question is not stock value, but is there something about the overall situation that we are missing. Is there something that we are overlooking that might lead to a "gotcha" by McBride and crew that we can prevent now.
That is a question well worth pondering.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
What is going on is illegal stock manipulation backed by MS, Friends of MS, and Sun. Plain and simple.
Unless you can determine ahead of time exactly what their game plans are, you are better off not playing. In particular, imagine if you had shorted them as a large number of ppl were suggesting. You would be out of everything now. I would think that now is a pretty good time to short, until I get to realizing that I do not know what motivates Sun and MS. So, it could go up another 20x, which would wipe me out.
I wish that I would have put down about 1000.00 - 10000.00 last march, but no way would I bet much over that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This article wasn't about stock tips and I have no idea why you chose to talk about it. The author was just using SCOs stock as an indicator that the company is not going to lose the court case like everyone else assumes will happen. And that the linux community should be worried, and help out.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
...don't take investment advice from slashdotters. They think that everyone is migrating to Linux and Open Source.
Warren Buffet (likely this countries most successful investor) stayed out of the tech bubble because it was a industry he was not familiar with. Meanwhile lots of other "smart" investors charged got into tech stocks and lost their money. Investors are can and do make emotional decisions. Everyone was excited about the tech sector four years ago and it just kept going up. Same thing with SCO. Most investors don't understand the GPL and to them this just looks like another lawsuit. Lets look at another factor, there realitively few share of SCO stock on the market. Supply and demand... The perception that there could be a big payoff makes lots of people want of piece of the action. The people that do sell price the stock high. So yes investors are usually savy and intelligent but they're also human.
To be a multi-millionare, assuming the 20x return on investment, you would have needed a minumum $100,000 investment.
"The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools and something unknown to Slashdot readers made the SCO stock price rise by 2.4%, on December 26th, over half a days trading."
.com bubble?
Excuse me... haven't you forgot the
Bunch of fools investing in worthless companies and artificially inflated their stock prices. Then the bubble burst.
If you read groklaw, you would find out that one of the times the stock jumped alot because over a weekend some invesment magazine called SCO a high risk investment with the potential for a huge payoff.
People who play the stock market are no different than the rest of the USA. Many of them are looking to get-rich-quick and most of them know $#%^ about computers and technology.
...SCO's stock is now more overvalued than a startup in Sunnyvale that plans to revolutionise the world of garden gnome retailing by harnessing the power of this new Internet thingy.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb."
- Dark Helmet
The other side is playing extremely dirty and somewhat effectively because they are backed by Sun and MS money. If we turn the other cheek, they will be more than happy to slap it with a lead filled sock. The high road only works if the bad guys don't intend to dynamite it from under you.
I'm not advocating anything like DDOS attacks or threats. Other than things that are blatently unethical and immoral, we should give as good as we get.
climbed from just over a dollar to nearly eighteen dollars and at its peak it was well over twenty dollars. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and if I had invested my life savings in SCO stock last Christmas I would now be a multi-millionaire
the stock increased by ~18. so, if we take $2,000,000 (minimum for a multi-millionaire) and divide by 18, we can extrapolate that Ed Almos' life savings is at least $111,000. not too shabby.
The only valid point SCO has unclearly made is that IBM is engaging in uncompetitive behaviour that is destroying SCO's markets.
IBM maybe contributing features and resources to Linux for less than it costs it to produce. It could be argued that this is violates antitrust statues and is no different from MS dumping Internet Explorer for free to push Netscape out of the market.
The difficulty in this case the 'price' of using Linux is that you must share code of any changes you distribute. It is non-trivial to assign a fair monetary value to this price.
Doesn't that imply that the easiest (or an easy) way to increase stock valuation is by overstating the potential benefits of a case (by claiming more damages than they can reasonably justify)? If the probability of winning is ignored, than simply increasing the potential benefit of a case should be sufficient to push stock prices up.
It seems as if the probability of SCO winning their contract case (and the implied infringement) AND the probability that they receive a significant award from the case (since they have been unwilling to disclose the nature of the specific contract breach, they haven't tried to mitigate their own damages) is being ignored or pushed off to the side. This probablility is hard to evaluate, and key to the calculation. With a lottery ticket I can at least estimate reasonably my cost-benefit ratio; with the SCO case that seems harder to do. The main benefit to SCO by winning would be the Linux user licence fees; one catch, though - these fees (charged to users who purchased and legitimately use Linux rather than infringers) would require an extraordinary interpretation of copyright law. It seems unlikely that the value derived from those fees will ever be paid, and thus a major part of the lottery winnings people who purchase SCO stock are counting on disappears.
It seems as if the odds of the lottery ticket is precisely what Wall Street doesn't know - the high potential outcome if SCO wins their case is what is seen and what drives the decision that it may be worth a lot of risk to buy a ticket. Since SCO's case seems weak (or at least it isn't emphasizing the facts of the case), SCO hasn't tried to limit its own damages, and a large part of damages (the licence fees) are not likely to ever see the insides of SCO's coffers, this seems like a bad judgement on Wall Street's part. This brings up the initial question : What are we missing here? What do SCO investors see that we don't see (and, presumably, that IBM doesn't see, either)?
First off, this is a good post and a valid point. What have we forgotten? Second, I think SCO is full of it. They have already contradicted themselves by stating that they own files that were never written by them(errno.h anyone?).
So in my mind this is just McBride trying to give his board what they want, a company whose stock is going up. He has even admitted this is his primary goal in several public speaking events!
But what is really getting me mad is the fact that in the end, the people who are really going to suffer are people like me, the developers, system admins, IT professionals. After companies are done paying the huge legal costs and false licensing fees, and then the legal costs to re-collect the false fees, how do you think they are going to then balance their budgets? By shrinking their IT staffs. Not by firing lawyers and upper execs. And does any of us really believe McBride is going to Jail? No, he has corporate law on his side. SCO may suffer, but not him. In the end he will have given his board exactly what they wanted, a year or so of climbing stock prices.
Just my bitching.
This has been done. Please see GrokLaw for the analysis you are requesting.
I would suggest that the Caldera/NewSCO slashdot subject icon be changed to the Groklaw logo.
Many thanks should go out to Pamela Jones for her strong leadership and coordination of the fight to find the truth behind the SCO allegations.
Without a doubt, the best I think I've ever seen.
Thanks for the food for thought.
Warren Buffet once said that you should pretend you have a card with 20 spots on it. Every time you buy a stock, you punch out one of the spots. And never sell your stocks.
If you think this way, you will never even think about touching crap like SCO.
Is SCO a solid business? How do they make money? How do they regularly increase their revenue? I can't answer any of these questions in a positive way. The only SCO I've seen in my life was a SCO Unix system about *10 years* ago, which was laughably generic, and I had heard of a GPL'd Unix called "Linux". And a bunch of SCO cash registers and stuff like that. Not exactly the next Microsoft, eh?
Imagine you bought SCO today. You're going to hold it for 40 years. Will SCO exist in 40 years? Hell, will Red Hat exist in 40 years?
Even if SCO "wins" this lawsuit, the best they can hope for is a settlement and some good PR. The Linux kernel will simply disappear or be re-written, the rest of our Linux systems will still be "clean" (i.e., X, Apache, GNU utils, etc). Do you think people will go back to closed-source expensive licenses for a commodity like operating systems?
If you want to be a good investor, buy solid diversified companies that sell products or services on a regular basis. Preferably ones that won't get replaced by open source. SCO is a shitsmear, an also-ran in a dying part of the industry (how's Sun doing these days, btw?), even if they win.
Its quite apparent that Slashdot hasnt forgotten to cover each individual and meaningless tidbit when it comes to the SCO soap opera.
SCO has had a lot of press releases that apparently have nothing to do with the case. They sued IBM for breach of contract and copyright infringement. "Lots of Unix code has gone into Linux." That is the file system JFS, NUMA and RCU, and some SMP stuff.
JFS was originally written for AIX, then rewritten from scratch for OS/2, and then ported to both AIX and Linux. So it's the OS/2 version we have in Linux now. I can't see how SCO is going to pull this, and I don't think they know themselves. If the court decides SCO owns the rights to JFS, it would be like IBM worked for SCO under a slave contract (do slaves have contracts?). Everything that touches Unix would be the property of SCO. They would never sell another license if that happened -- if the GPL is viral, SCO's license would be alienesque (like Ridley Scott's Alien, that is).
So SCO is threatening everyone else too. They want $3.50. I mean $699. If anything that has touched Unix in some way is their code, the fact that IBM has dumped some such code into Linux would make Linux their code too. So the case is absurd. Or it seems to be. It looks like Nigerian scam-spam: It's far too good to be true (for SCO's investors: if they win, they own the world), and it probably isn't. But with the media coverage SCO gets, at least some people will be stupid enough to buy stock.
In the meantime, maybe SCO actually has a few extra cards up their asses^H^H^H^H^Hsleaves, and maybe they actually have a case. But it's not the same case they play through the media.
It is incorrect to assume that all investors in the stock market -- or even a majority of them -- are making decisions based on sound data.
There is one theory that is widely regarded in the investment world, usually called the Efficient Market Hypothesis. It states that the stock market is efficient, that at any given time all public factors relating to a given issue (company) have been considered by intelligent investors and that the price of a company's stock always accurately reflects the value of the underlying business.
The problem with this theory is that it is utter nonsense. People buy companies based on all manner of crazy metrics: whether a certain football team won, a company seeming like a "sure bet," or some charlatan hawking the latest penny issue (that he purchased in large quantity before making the recommendation.) And price, by the way, is determined by supply and demand.
Now, that might make for a very boring story, but it is relevant in the following manner: there is another valuation model that more accurately reflects the way the stock market actually works.
It's called the Greater Fool Theory.
The definition of the Greater Fool Theory has changed over time, but a current definition is: a fool buys a stock without any sound fundamental analysis hoping to sell it at a profit to a greater fool, who expects in turn to sell it at a profit to a still greater fool. Rinse and repeat.
SCO may well have a case. I really don't know, but you all had better believe that the Greater Fool Theory played a big role in SCO's meteoric rise.
IBM is our ally. They have been a wonderful ally, fighting the good fight in a war that is very important to us. But while our interests currently align very nicely with IBM's in the SCO mess, our interests don't line up totally with theirs, and they won't always line up as well as they currently do. We need to keep an eye on what we do if IBM shifts course.
The RedHat lawsuit keeps me from being too worried, though...
The thing is, as ignorant as we are of the stock market, the stock market is just as ignorant of us. They see a big business like SCO, and assume they're going to win, that their claims are valid - they have to opporate that way in order not to get hung. As a result, the SCO group benifits from the chaos, but this is short term. They will get theirs. Sadly, by the time they do, the damage will have been done.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
But what if whoever is behind this actually wants SCO to lose? Might an IBM victory actually be engineered to be Pyrrhic for Linux?
Consider that both SCO's case and the GPL revolve around the notion of derived work which is legally up for grabs. Might SCO's claim -- that all things UNIX belong to them as derived works -- get laughed out of court in a way that actually weakens the somewhat similar provisions of the GPL?
What if the goal was to downgrade the GPL to a legal equivalent of LGPL or even BSD? (The GPL hopes to make "linking" a criterion for "derived". Is SCO trying or even in a position to make such a claim and get it struck down? I don't know.)
Yes, I realize the situations are different (contract law here, copyright law there), and this hardly explains the investor frenzy on SCO. Still maybe worth keeping in mind...
Indeed, perhaps we need to remember Enron and many other companies. High stocks for quite awhile, even stayed up despite many whisperings of problems, and finally plummeting down to nothing. It wasn't because any of these companies had something special, they just acted like they did and allowed others to fall for what they though was "easy money"
We forgot a mare for Darl, to help him losen his tension and relax.
Most people think that just buying stock is done by investors. Real investors buy and keep stocks for long term. In fact, the SCOX's stock price increases can be explained by the manipulation of speculators, that is, people who invest with short term view and which are eager to make risky moves. Some of them very skillful manipulate the stock prices, inciting other (poor) naive investors to buy inflated stock. Obviously, those speculators are waiting at the last minute to sell. My prediction is that SCOX stock prices will start go down by the end of the week.
Is the philosophy of "The Big Lie". Basically the idea is that if you repeat a falsehood stridently enough and often enough then even your detractors will start to argue about to what degree it is true rather than whether it is true at all.
Right now is a bad time to worry about hypothetical secrets up SCO's sleeve. If they have any evidence more compelling than the slide show fiaSCO, we'll all find out next week after the judge's deadline for them to present it has passed. What's more, since IBM was wise enough to include all of SCO's wild accusations (and not just the limited set they've actually risked saying to a judge instead of a reporter) in their counterclaims and discovery requests, next week we should be able to take a nice long look at everything based on the facts rather than on our trust (or lack thereof) in Blake Stowell and Darl McBride.
Of course, this all depends on SCO being unwilling to try and weasel out of a court order, but if I'm wrong and they have that kind of chutzpah I think it will speak for itself too.
Let's take a different approach and assume that if SCO wins its case, everybody will stop using Linux. At that point, SCO will be worth its cash on hand. Ignoring whatever it needs to shell out to lawyers and Satan, $3B in cash would give a $3B book value and a $3B market cap since they would have no revenue. In that case, their current market cap is 1/12 of that, so the market is giving them a 1/12 chance of winning. That's a lot better than the 0.005 probability, but I still feel much better being on the 11/12 side.
Disclaimer: this are back-of-the envelope calculations. Please do your own math before drawing any conclusions and please share the results here.
Click on Preferences, then Comments, and under the Anonymous Modifier select box choose -6.
Clearly investors are not blind to SCO's situation. They are a sinking ship and are trying to rescue themselves anyway they can. Indeed, I believe from the beginning, their strategy was to try and convince IBM that buying SCO was the cheapest solution. I say this because these type of investors are not interested in a long drawn out court battle. It will take ten years to sort all this out, which is far to long for the typical large investor.
Furthermore, evidence to the buy me so I do not hurt you tactic can be found in overtures that have made towards Goggle. Simply put, Goggle is looking at $10+ billion dollar IPO which could be severely harmed by a lingering intellectual property lawsuit from SCO. So what does SCO hope Google will do? Why buy them with some pre-IPO shares and end all the legal problems. Guess who makes out incredibly well the day of the IPO by selling their shares?
Other than picking a fight with IBM, they have done nothing but post press release and send letters to create FUD in the market. So what to do? Get back to work, ignore SCO. Do what go us here in the first place -- write code, solve problems, use Linux, and plan world domination
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Livecharts SCOX Values Check out the detailed quote and add a volume study. Insiders own about 45% Institutions about 31% That only leaves 24% laying around to trade. Volume is really low. Looking at the time and sales for the past few weeks there have been almost no large block trades. With so little trading volume it's probably relatively easy to keep the price up. We'll see what happens with the institutionals after the 11th of Jan.
Here are some rather random thoughts:
;-)
- patience. "we" keep forgetting to be patient
- focus. "we" got baffled with bullshit alright
- history. "we" should have *started* with looking into the USL/BSDi case. That's where it'll end and it was very predictable.
- agendas. "we" are stupid to follow the "ememy of enemy equals friend" idea. Distrust Novell. Distrust IBM. Trust me on this
But most importantly, IMHO "we" forgot "our" role in all this. "We" played right into SCOs hand with the endless detail delving. No one but "us" cares. All they see is freaky commie geeks. Of course Darl knew and knows that. He made "us" jump on command. People have rightfully called him the comic relief but to most outsiders so are "we".
So what then? Here's something: sit and wait, perhaps document what happened when if you feel the need to. Write a book about it, someone will (please don't let that be JonKatz or ESR).
Didn't SCO need an investment to keep their attack-lawyers paid enough to tide them through. Would it be enough to pay for 5-10 years? Some of their "lenders" can even pull their funding if they don't like the way things go.
The BS from SCO could certainly last a long time, but how long can they afford the lawyers required to face IBM-et-al before they end up with moths in their pockets?
SCO is a successful marketing company, not software company. When you view them as a marketing company, you will understand why they continue to make friends.
Notwithstanding, they have yet to "make" money, and are only profitable due to one of the richest companies in the world. As an extension of the will of MS, their stock price deserves to be higher.
Alas, people are ignorant. When MS is finished with them, or when IBM makes them pay, or when Redhat gets their day in court, it will be a rude awakening. All insiders are selling. Its elementary.
a towel
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Uh... ever heard of Groklaw? It's probably more important to ask what have they forgotten, as they are the ones with the most information collected on this subject.
The majority of the slashdot posts on the subject have had to deal with the GPL, the copyright issues involved and questions of code pedigree... e.g. "that's not SCO code, it's BSD code!"
While these comments have their merit, they miss the real issues here. SCO hasn't shown anything real yet... their code samples have been deceptively easy to debunk as not actually being "SCO Code".
With as much on the line as SCO has, they have to have an ace in the hole... maybe some former IBM employee that will testify he was asked by a manager to merge AIX code, maybe just a few incriminating lines here and there that can be removed, and they can still claim damages on IBM, but I refuse to believe that SCO, a company with a history of successful IP litigation, is going into this with as flimsy a case as it appears from the outside.
All this means to us as users is that we may have to downgrade kernels if Linux code is lost this way, and as a community we stand to lose one of the biggest commercial supporters of OSS... This will certainly have its damaging effects, but it's far from the end of the world.
Unlike your diving friend, however, we are not 300ft. down and we don't have upwards of 6 atmospheres of pressure bearing down on us. We're in a far-from-fatal situation, and thankfully, we'll have some resolution to this mess soon enough.
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten. -- Marie Antoinette
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
It seems to me that SCO's big promise to investors is that they will find a way to collect money from LINUX users.
I think there are only 2 possible outcomes.
Outcome 1: SCO is wrong and looses it's claim.
Result: LINUX moves on unaffected and SCO goes the way of the Dodo.
Outcome 2: SCO wins it's claim.
Result: LINUX replaces the offending code and SCO no longer has grounds for a claim. Again, SCO becomes irrelavant if not bankrupt.
You have forgotten that fraud, stock manipulation, and/or empty promises pay off--for a while. If you can time it right, you can get very wealthy from them. In fact, any meteoric rise in stock values is almost certainly too good to be based on reality, whether it's SCO, Microsoft, or your favorite Internet startup.
The long and the short of it is that a stock (or anything else for that matter) is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, and rich people can skew the market with their whims. Chateau Petrus costs $400 dollars a bottle not because it's ten times better than Silver Oak cabernet at $40 a bottle, but because there are enough people out there with more money than brains willing to pay $400 for Petrus. As a result, some people who don't even like wine would pay $300 for a bottle of Petrus even though they know it isn't "really" worth that much because they can turn around and sell it to an even bigger fool at $400.
In the case of SCO the rich buyer skewing the market is, of course, Microsoft. Microsoft wants to keep SCO a viable company because they can use SCO as an attack dog against Linux. SCO's actions have been so extreme (I don't know how some of the SCO people can look at themselves in the mirror) that I suspect that Microsoft actually has some additional leverage over them that is not publicly known.
By the way, Apple is also a lap dog for Microsoft that they keep around only so that they can argue that they are not a monopoly.
What have we forgotten? We have forgotten (or perhaps never really come to grips with the fact) that Microsoft does not play fair, and that they are powerful enough to keep this fact very well hidden even from people who ought to know better.
2. Medium term speculators who can afford to lose the money and see the potential gains as worth the risk.
3. The scarcity of the public stock. It's a very closely held company.
The buyers of SCO stock aren't really investors - they're in it for the short term...SCO is a vehicle for making money and nothing more. There are plenty of examples of SCO-type speculators out there. We focus on SCO because the IP issue is near and dear to our hearts, but from a financial point of view, there are a hundred SCO's to chose from if you want to put your money into an extremely volatile stock.
"Investors", the people who look out for more than a year at a time, aren't putting money into SCO or its ilk. They're looking at capital gains, not short term income. Now, there's nothing wrong with either way of investing, but I'm not sure that the volatility of SCO's stock is any indicator that we've forgotten anything.
And, to your other comment, certainly it's worthwhile to rally around IBM, but, in the end, it doesn't matter if we're all on IBM's side or not. The court will decide SCO's and IBM's cases on their legal merits, regardless of who has the larger fan club. But I understand your sentiments...and you probably already knew all of this anyway!
-h-
I had forgotten to mail Darl 5 pounds of my excrement on Christmas.
Maybe I'll just wait `til Valentine's and send it in a heart-shaped box...
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
As I recall, IBM filed something electronically a few minutes past the deadline earlier in this case. When SCO tried to get it thrown out the judge kept it in - but told SCO that he'd let them file one a few minutes after the deadline, just to be fair. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think the main thing is that we geeks in general focus more on certain types of facts instead of others.
Has the dot-com bubble bursting taught you nothing? People who invest -- intelligent as they are -- largely ARE capable of being fooled. Not forever, but for a long time. And be sure you understand -- the big-time investors were not the ones harmed by the dot-com bubble bursting. The trick is to recognize when you're being played for a fool.
Perception of facts is what drives the world far more than the actual facts. Galileo screwed up -- not by believing that the world revolved around the sun, because he was right, but by believing that being right on that fact was the most important thing. Far more important than being right is how you relate to people, and how you are remembered.
Walter: "Am I wrong?"
The Dude: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an ASSHOLE!"
What's going on here is that SCO has gotten people talking. They've got a few people believing that SCO might have a chance or a point. They've got a few companies that are competitors with Linux throwing money their way. And there are big-time professional investors who recognize that all of the noise SCO makes will make it into a good SHORT-TERM investment opportunity. (And by short-term, I mean "Less than 5 years.") Not because SCO is right or wrong, but because they will incur support from Microsoft, attention from the industry, and increase the public-perceived value with all of the noise they make -- at least for a while.
Humans are ultimately as manageable as code, and can be engineered as such. The difference between a human and a transistor is that where a change in the reality of a signal is what causes a transistor to change its state, it is a change in a person's perception of reality that causes a person to change his or her mind. Thus it is perception that governs the world.
Try and think of it in these terms if it makes you feel more comfortable: We give a transistor, within a certain margin of error, a threshold for detecting whether a signal is low or high. In truth it's not whether that signal is low or high that matters, but whether that semiconductor detects that the signal is low or high. It's not the real voltage that matters, but that the circuit "thinks" there's a change.
In other words, the driving factor behind the stock price of SCO is not the existence or nonexistence of code that may or may not have been copied, but rather people's perceptions of the case, which change from week to week... along with SCO's claims.
Ultimately, SCO will probably get squashed like a bug in this case -- not because of the strength of their argument, but more simply because of the strength of IBM's legal team. But that doesn't mean they'll go out of business. That doesn't even mean their stock price won't get a short-term kick in the ass, like you note that it received. Geeks know what they did, and see the end result. But in the meanwhile, there might be a nice ride you want to catch a hold of.
Unless your morals, like mine, prevent you from investing in scuzzy companies.
Silly morals.
The British ruled a larger empire for longer and with more justice than the United States so get over it you pathetic ex-colonial wnaker.
Investors are no fools. The good ones will make money on this. Since the price will go up because there are in fact many fools in the market, the savvy investor will take the ride up to the top to pick the fruit. They will be the ones to sell out first. The best of the best will see the right signals and sell at the highest point, leaving the fool investors who bought it at various prices across the whole range dealing with trying to recover a meager few cents per share once the whole thing crashes.
Many investors are anticipating a buyout, perhaps by IBM itself.
But this could be a while. The wheels of justice grind slowly (and sometimes run in reverse for a while). Just look at all the time it has taken to even get to arguing about discovery, and counter arguing about who's not cooperating in discovery. The crash might not happen for another year or two or maybe even longer.
If you didn't get in on SCO when it started up, then what you might want to look into doing is shorting the stock just before you think it will crash. Shorting the stock can be a lot riskier, so you better be a good investor if you want to do this. If you don't know what it means, don't even think of trying it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is a big difference between the Open Source development model and people buying stock.
In the Open Source development model, the question the individual usually asks is: "how can I contribute to improve the project"?
When buying stock these days, what most people ask is "how can I take advantage of a situation to my own benifit"?
The first is a collabrative, community effort, wheras the latter is personal greed. There's nothing wrong with reasonable personal greed, and I'm sure many of the investors concerned are pretty reasonable people. They're speculating that all of the buzz surrounding SCO will cause the stock price to rise (or, if they're dealing in options, may be buying in at last years low price and selling at todays inflated price at a profit).
Investors are not necessarily stating that they believe in the company or its products, or that they think the company has a future. Individuals and organizations that deal in day trading and other short-term investment strategies speculate purely on wether or not they'll be able to sell at a profit.
Also remember that for every smart investor, there are probably two dumb ones out there buying up stocks they think they'll flip for a quick profit, but who wind up falling flat on their faces. After all, when companies start to tank and their stocks start selling at a fraction of their previous value, someone is buying them up (otherwise the sellers couldn't sell). There have been a whole lot of people in the history of stock trading who have would up with completely worthless shares when a company went completely under.
You shouldn't assume the stock buyers know something we don't when it comes to SCO. They probably just know that SCO being in the news is pushing their share prices up somewhat, and that if SCO wins even a minor battle (say, they win some evidetiary motion against IBM) the stock price could go up, and they could sell it for a quick profit -- even if SCO eventually loses the war.
Of course, there could be another reason for buying up SCO stock -- if the Linux community (or those friendly to it) could get ahold of a majority of shares they could turf Mr. McBride and stop the insanity :).
(And that's something that shouldn't be completely discounted -- a major SCO customer (like, say, McDonalds) could in theory be quietly buying up SCO stock to force a change in the executive. That could benifit such a buyer if they're one that has an interest in using Linux in their enterprise either now or in the future).
Yaz.
"The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools and something unknown to Slashdot readers made the SCO stock price rise by 2.4%, on December 26th, over half a days trading."
People who PLAY the stock market ARE indeed fools. The only real winnners, it's been proven over and over, are the ones who buy stocks of companies that provide real value and hold on to them long term.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Well, fuck the justice.
The British were just so much cooler. They had a cool accent, tea, a king, nice uniforms...
What do the Americunts have? An accent that hurts the ears, Coca Cola, a dyslexic idiot in a suit and ugly uniforms that make me wanna puke my guts out.
We have forgotten that there is more to copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation than evidence of direct copying. If this thing gets to a jury trial, we have to remember what it looks like to the 12 grandmas that will be sitting in the jury box:
o Linux is named after Unix (or at least it sounds like it was). The lawyers will have a field day with this one. It may not matter legally, but it goes a long way towards planting the seed in the jurors minds that Linux is a stolen trade secret.
o Both Unix and Linux have a similar structure. While it is slowly diverging, it is clear that Linux was modeled after Unix. The kernel structure, header files, shells, directory structure, and basic application level all appear very similar.
o On top of this, there will inevitably be code presented that is either identical or very similar. It doesn't matter if Linus can explain away all of the similarities - the fact is that they still exist. It is clear that the Unix header files were used as a template for Linux - I don't think anybody can dispute this.
To those of us that have been with Linux from the beginning, or have contributed source to the Linux project, this case is obviously unfounded. We have forgotten what it must look like to people who don't know the history of Linux, and who don't understand the open source mindset.
The answer is something I've known for a long time: the stock market has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with reality! It's a terrible indicator of the health of a company or the real strength of our economy. When I'm President, the first thing I'll do is shut down Wall Street. All corporations will become public non-profits, and investments will be treated as loans to be paid back with interest, not perpetual debts that can never be paid off.
Vote Krumwiede in 2012!
It's strange to me that the SEC went after Martha Steward, but doesn't seem to notice Darl McBride. It seems to me that whether or not SCO gets bought, loses in court or goes out of business, Darl McBride and his cronies have already accumulated considerable wealth just from the activity on SCO stock generated by their litigious antics. People who are pushing the stock price up probably don't understand much about UNIX, Linux, the GPL etc... They just like getting rich. I remember when Red Hat had their IPO, I knew people who made money off the stock who didn't have a clue as to what Linux was ("what's an operating system??") but bought the stock because of hype and hearsay. The average daytraders who have been following the news ( in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine or USA Today , but probably not slashdot -- [ "what's slashdot ??" ] ) probably think that SCO may have a chance to win, and are probably encouraged by the rise in the stock price ( can you say "self-fulfilling prophecy"? ). I tempted to advise my friends who ask about investing in SCO to buy the stock but sell right before the IBM case goes to trial. That's probably what Darl is planning to do. Of course, some SCO executives have already cashed in.
their is possive, they're is a common noun-verb contraction.
Presuming that this is a legitimate question and is not just someone doing a Kevin McBride impression... Go to the Yahoo SCOX message list and ask this question instead. Rather than being called a phallus smoking teabagger, you will get decent answers from people who understand stock manipulation and how it is performed. And stock manipulation is exactly what SCOX is. As for your whinging about not having a new speedboat, stop it: it's irritating.
...the stock market is about what people believe. What they believe the industry will be worth in the future (dotcom wave), what the company will be worth in the future (realeconomy stock value), what they believe other people will think the company will be worth in the future (pyschological stock value).
Everybody is trying to make find something they can buy cheap and sell high to somebody else. That's really all that matters. Find something for which someone will give more than you bought it for. Be it stock, options or other derivates.
SCOs stock value is high because they've managed to convince a great number of people that their stock is valuable - nothing more, nothing less. And it's still valuable to purchase stock now, if you think there's a new boatload of suckers that will buy it for twice that tomorrow. Regardless of what the "real" value is.
The thing is, it's not only to predict that it's going down - it's also about predicting *when* it's going down. Take for instance the SCO case, though there is no options market for that stock. Say you were buying sell options, i.e. you'd earn money if the stock dived.
So far, you'd only be losing money, because the stock keeps going up. The bubble is swelling. But unless you are able to predict *when* it bursts, you can't make money off it. Is it now on the 9th? Is it when they get to court? Is it when there's a final verdict? When?
It's not about the merits of the case. It's about when "other people" stop buying the stock. That's when the price drops. You're looking to second-guess the other investors, or "the market" if you will. And they're looking to second-guess you. Who's fooling who. That's really what it's all about.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
Maybe someone should make a complaint to the SEC?
Am I the only one that thinks that Dairl and friends have been ripping off SCO investors and are now using FUD to get more investors to rip off.
Then, at the end, when they lose everything, it becomes an easy way to dispose of the "Body" of SCO.
Somewhat similar to the play in a movie called "The producers." It's Just Enron again, with a smaller company.
Less look fast, more go fast.
"The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools and something unknown to Slashdot readers made the SCO stock price rise by 2.4%, on December 26th, over half a days trading.
Actually, quite a few are fools. LOTS are. I speak as one who has worked closely with stock brokers and CFPs for nearly a decade. During the tech boom, many average joes and josephines became day traders because, it seemed, no one could lose. People thought that because they could clear a few grand in a month of trading, they were suddenly supertraders. These people should have stayed away, but they got hooked, and life savings and family nest eggs were lost hand-over-fist. Never judge the value of a company, or the company's leadership, over brief swings in stock prices. Stock price has nothing - - NOTHING - - to do with a company's value. Everyone should know this by now.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
The stock markets (and commodities markets) are the worlds largest poker games. When you buy a stock (or commodity) you are wagering that its value will increase over time. Sometimes you also have to be smart enough to sell before that value declines.
The difference between the markets and a poker game is the gross value of the poker game is generally fixed, whereas the markets have no fixed value. With poker when one player wins the others lose. This is not true with the markets because of "capital creation".
People are buying SCOX because they are gambling that SCOX actually has a case against IBM, et al. and there will be an increase in capital on the SCOX ledger because of the outcome.
BTW, I rarely wager on a 7-2 off-suit.
We have forgotten that the stock market has its own rules.
There are many reasons why SCOX is rising this year. One has been mentioned a couple times already: The lottery ticket theory.
Then, once a stock is rising, it usually drags investors in. Definitely the dumb kind ("oh, it's going up. Must buy"), often the smarter kind, who plan on selling it again as soon as it shows signs of dropping.
Also mentioned already was that SCOX doesn't exactly have a huge volume, so it can be moved by fairly small trades.
And you can bet that Canopy and other investors do everything they can to drive the price up. It is, after all, part of their "net worth".
It all boils down to this: Even if SCO is doomed to fail in the end, from an investment perspective, it can be smart to buy them right until the moment said end starts to happen.
The lawsuit certainly has a much smaller impact than you think. It is easily overshadowed by the press releases and quarterly reports.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a broker, but only for a short time and it's been a while.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
But if you follow what's going on (I read GROKLAW regularly) you see that SCO is just plain in flail mode. IBM's version of the SysV contract has an appendix that says "but anything IBM invents, IBM still owns." Whoops, there goes SCO's whole claim to JFS and just about everything else.
The continued argument goes like this: Sure, IBM has that extra bit in their contract. But Sequent didn't, and code developed by them as part of Dynix/ptx doesn't fall under that agreement, even though IBM later bought Sequent. And we know for sure that the Linux read-copy update code is based on that from Dynix.
This is the strongest argument SCO has, and it will have to be fought by proving that RCU was developed independently of Dynix and Unix per se -- that it's separate code that can be plugged in anywhere. From the RCU development whitepapers I've read, it looks like this is indeed demonstrable, but it's very unfortunately not cut and dried.
Or maybe IBM can show that their license addendum does or should apply to code developed by someone they've purchased. That's *way* over my legal head.
If there is a 10% chance that SCO will win and end up worth $2.5B (i.e. 10x what it is now) then the current price makes sense if you like betting on long-shots. Isn't that the whole premise behind venture capitalism?
Buy low, sell high!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Oh, you try to sound all nice and unbiased. Sure. But your true colors show through. Note:
Even though I expect the lawsuit to take 5+ years, the winds will be blowing for or against SCO well before the end.
Ah-HA! By your suggestion that it would be theoretically possible for things to somehow go well for SCO we see the terrible bias which corrupts you.
Wait...
-- dR.fuZZo
:P
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Even MSN is reporting the bubble is going to burst, believe it or not.
The SCO Group, Inc., a small-cap growth company in the technology sector, is expected to significantly underperform the market over the next six months with very high risk.
IMHO, what we really have forgotten, or never accepted to begin with, is that ALL copyrights are wrong, ALL copyrights are bad, and ALL copyrights are an unethical restriction on what other people can copy that may be a right under the Law - but have no moral justification at all. In a way SCO has already won, because they've taken our focus off of wether it's right to restrict copying to begin with and reset it on technical details of law and code that noone will really understand till it's all over.
Just because someone with money says, "there's something to that SCO case" doesn't mean there actually is.
We haven't forgotten anything. The people that buy stocks don't buy them because the company has a lawsuit with merit. They buy the stock because it's going up and they can make money on it.
The average stock broker knows NOTHING about the tech industry. They buy into the FUD, Vaporware, and all the other nonesense just like the average joe schmoe sitting infront of a computer. Oh wait, they are the average Joe Schmoe sitting infront of a computer.
They bought the stock and it rose, there's still no judgement stating that SCO is right or wrong, but they SPECULATE they are right. Thus they poor money into it expecting a huge payoff when SCO wins. Hell, if nothing else, they've made money now as it is if they get out quick enough WHEN it starts to bomb.
It's all about manipulation and has no bearing or merit to the case at hand.
But the game's already been set and it's just a matter of waiting to see how it plays. Will SCO get anybody to cough up cash for stuff SCO doesn't own? How long will SCO be able to keep stalling the court? Will the astonishingly well-paid Mr. Boies actually show up, or will he be so embarassed that he sends in Darl's brother again? It's a bit like Superbowl XX; you knew the Bears were going to pound the Patriots into the dirt, it was just a question of how long it would take and what the point spread was going to be.
If the Linux community must bring something to the proceedings, I recommend popcorn and a drink.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
You should read a WW II history book. Specifically, look up Russia.
I think this covers it well...
Posted By: Anon
*Its become patently obvious that this entire lawsuit soap opera was carefully
planned ages ago, and it is succeeding in its primary aims. From the point
SCOG's stock became worthless, and the spreadsheet numbers were projected ahead
to reveal that SCOG was essentially dead no matter what, this project became a
no risk proposition. There is no case, there never was; the whole point of the
"lawsuit" was to waltz up to the biggest IP giant on the block and
slap them in the face, simply to get the largest shock value and the highest
possible media exposure. They *know* IBM will kill them, they also know how long
it will take this glacier to move down the valley. The attack on Linux (outside
the courtroom) is a simple red cape waved to enrage the zealous bulls in the
tech area, and provide a venue to disburse pearls of FUD *seemingly* supportive
of the bogus claims, the details of which will zoom safely over the heads of
investor-types. They will see this as a suits vs. bearded freaks issue and
choose who is making the credible claims based on that alone, and some will
invest cash accordingly. The stock is held in a way that lends itself to easy
manipulation, and they can sell THIS proposition to *outside investors who think
they are inside*, who are investing as a way to make money on the transitory
stock prices, NOT the value of SCOG as a going concern with any hope of a big
recovery. The GAME is to sustain the illusion of the stock value (created by all
the hubbubb and wild claims) long enough to pass the stock holdings from the
real insiders to the dufus outsiders, before the whole theatre folds. The method
used to carefully milk the stock prices without precipitating a sell-off is the
only portion of this drama that will require real skill, and every single day
that goes by with more stock cashed out is a complete WIN, even if there is a
good amount left on the table when the shoe drops. The Big Name Lawyer is on the
payroll to keep the Real Insiders out of prison, and encumber any assets left on
the corpse of the dead company to proxies of the principle players and the
!insider investors, he's the Elihu Root telling them HOW to do what they WANT
to do, working completely behind the scenes. The courtroom end is being handled
by a sock puppet wearing clown hair, as any money or effort spent there is a
hopeless waste of resources; maximizing the time taken for the procedural flow
is the only point of even showing up in court. The ball is rolling, now all they
need is a voice (any voice) in the courtroom saying "yeah yeah whatever,
can we have more time". There is no point in getting all hung up in the
hedgerow country of the details of ANY of SCOG's infringement FUD. If you want
to play the "you attacked Linux, prepare to die" card, the only
target of any consequence is the balancing act of the stock prices. The wind of
truth from a butterfly's wing can tip that one over the precipice, under the
right conditions. *
Note: Insiders are not necessary employed by SCO or even the holding company that owns SCO.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
It just so happens we're not spineless. Except you, Mr. Rollover. I'm glad you don't work for IBM.
Acting meek and meely-mouthed is not going to get us anywhere. Why should we not be confident, hold our heads up and say "Hey, we didn't do anything wrong!!! Those guys are full of crap! We can show you how they are full of crap!" That's what Bruce Perins and Groklaw and Linus and numerous top players have been doing. If at the end of making their case they make an editorial comment, deal with it. Some of these guys are media savy to know that you have to give a soundbite if you want press.
We forgot to take the high road? Blow me! Why should we not be outraged? SCO is stealing - yes, STEALING - the work of honest developers and distributing it without a valid license. SCO is not abiding by the GPL. They are now software pirates.
at least I can buy a Powerball ticket for $1, and the odds are known (although the payoff is not). SCO stock is at least ten times that, and the probability of winning is less well known, let alone the actual monetary value to an individual stockholder (which is probably less than $200 - 10-20:1 return).
If you knew then what you do now? I mean, sure, you could have, but would you have?
Would you have subsidized the kind of vileness that is SCO with your hard earned dollars, rode the wave of artificial esteem in the coat-and-tie world that SCO has enjoyed for becoming a copyright capitalist crusader, then topped it all off by selling that stock to someone sycophantic or stupid enough to buy SCO at $20, while you knew full well that the value was inflated? Would you really have been able to leave this entire situation with no more concern about what you did and why you did it than is required to pick out a new boat?
Is the difference between SCO and the rest of us really just a matter of opportunity?
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
No load funds pegged to an index! diversifying your portfolio! Cost averaging! I'd say mod you up, but you're already at 5.
FOr everyone else, this is sound advice.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
So I estimate that your life savings is about $106,000 or more. That would be enough to earn $2,014,000. Assuming the best of best case scenarios and you could have bought on the cheap all shares at $1.00 and sold all shares at $20.00 unlikely but at a profit of $19 a share.
What a lot of nonsense. Intellectual property is, on the whole, a great boon to society, although it's undeniable that the privelege can be abused. I wonder if those people who are so critical of IP rights have just never produced any of value.
*if* SCO wins, they'll get NOTHING from me. *If* they do actually own the rights to some software I'm running, I'll rewrite the necessary parts myself (though I think it'd be more elegant and secure if we all contributed to it...) before they'll see a penny of my money.
I also refuse to invest in a company I don't believe is moral. IMHO, SCO is using fear to create wealth for themselves.
I would feel very satisfied if SCO disappeard tomorrow and stopped bullying those who support open source.
I, personally, don't believe investing in SCO is a wise or proper thing to do.
I think the article is indicating that the stock price hints that there might be more behind the company than what we see in the anti-SCO press. The stock is rising. Is there something that the anti-SCO press is missing about the company? or is it a suckers' bubble?
I tend to take any stock that comes from Provo with a grain of salt. Provo is the MLM capital of the world. Here is another Utah Valley company: The Dream Mine was revealed to a prophet about a hundred years. It is not a traditional mine. The mine actually leads to the hidden vault of treasures buried by the Nephites. FYI, the Nephites were from a lost tribes of Isreal that came to America on a submarine a few thousand years ago. They got all the best treasures. But the Lamanites (American Indians) were horrible sinful creatures. They killed all the Nephites. The Nephites buried all of their treasures before the final battle.
The trick to the mine is that the secret entrance will not be revealed until God is getting ready to smite the gentiles.
This investment is great if you wish to hedge against Armagedden, and the stock tends to do quite well, despite the fact that it won't have a product until the end of the world.
Unfortunately, you have to be of the faith to own stock.
SCO is likely just another dream mine. As mentioned early, the faithful have a long history of falling for every MLM and get rich quick scheme you can name. They often get burned. Of course, if the case comes before a jury of the faithful, SCO will win big time, regardless of the merits of their case.
The Utah Court system is SCO's ace in the hole. If the jury thinks that ruling in favor SCO would make Utah Valley the new Bellevue, then they might rule for SCO. Regardless, I would be worried about shorting SCO or any penny stock from Utah, as Provo Stocks have certain irrational characteristics.
Maybe a certain company in Redmond secretly sponsoring SCO to throw up shit has something to do with their apparent success so far.
Maybe it doesn't.
Because trustworthy information of this kind of information normally isn't available, investors make their investment decisions without first looking for "something like Groklaw".
Some investors will think "hmm maybe SCO actually has intellectual property in Linux, in that case their stock is grossly undervalued"... even if they consider the probability of that to be pretty low, it will appear reasonable to them to have a small (in relation to their total portfolio) SCO investment.
Some investors will think "I sure hope that this doesn't work out for SCO because I have investments in companies which will be hurt if GNU/Linux isn't free anymore", and they may decide to buy some SCO stock as part of a risk management strategy (to prevent unacceptable big losses in the case that an SCO victory kills GNU/Linux).
Some investors will think "Those SCO statements sound like utter nonsense to me". These won't buy, but they won't sell either - because they don't have SCO shares, and because "shorting stock", i.e. borrowing shares with a promise to give them back at a later date is difficult (impossible for small-time investors?) and very risky (even if we know that SCO stock will go down in the long run, it is quite possible that they temporarily might go up by say a factor of five for a short period of time before then, and if that's the time when you have to buy because you promised to give back those shares, you lose a *lot* of money).
The above analysis shows two categories of investors who are inclined to buy and one category of investors who are not likely to take any action.
This is consistent with the observed share prices.
I think one of the single biggest problems that we aren't seeing are what are the "costs" of this litigation? My biggest concern is that the focus of the Linux movement is forced to be split from innovation and battling MS FUD. To, having to continue to innovate, battle MS FUD and fend off the lawyers. Wouldn't you rather see more money going to developers and people marketing Linux, then sending more money to the lawyers? We need to change minds by proving we have a superior product and develop a competitive product. And it seems to me that this uncertainty can only draw focus away from growth. But that's just my 2 cents.
...the investors know what they are doing is rather unfounded. Otherwise there would not have been a dot bomb where they lost lots of money. It is extremely unlikely that those investors all see something obvious that we have completely missed. In fact, I would say that it is the other way round, that the investors missed something that we know because (1) they know way less about the details of this shenanigan and (2) they are prolly blinded by greed. In other words, investors are mostly lemmings.
Cheers,
e.
The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools ...
Umm, shows what you know. The key phrase here is "regular basis". If you play the stock market on a regular basis, you are either a stock market professional or, by definition, a so-called day trader. I would venture to guess that foolish day traders outnumber wise day traders (if there is such a thing) and non-foolish stock market professionals about 100:1
Additionally, stock market professionals that are focused on short term gains do not care at all about a companies potental long term profits (duhh..). Rather, they make their money anticipating changes in perception. Despite what anyone tells you, perception is not reality. Generally, the reality of a company does not actually change as fast as this type of stock flux (read "perception") would indicate. This means that usually in this sort of stock flux situation, many people (enough to drive the stock up, or sometimes down that far) have a perception that does not jive with reality. As far as I'm concerned, this is the definition of "fool". QED.
It seems to me that the sheer volume of individual stock flux in todays market indicates that there are indeed a vast number fools that play the stock market on a regular basis.
I think what at least some of the investors know, and we do not, is The Bigger Idiot Theory. In real estate, you sometimes buy a property and then find out it's either overpriced, or a dog. That's when you start buffing up the property and looking for a bigger idiot than yourself.
It's entirely possible that many of these traders don't know or care if the SCO arguments are valid. They could well be banking on finding the bigger idiot before the day of reckoning.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
What WE forgot was that just because something has no technical merits doesn't mean it can't have some short-term financial merits. The same thing was true of the dot com bubble. Ultimately most of the businesses being developped were nothing stable, and couldn't survive long or turn a profit. That is irrelevant, however, when it comes to 'herd mentality' - because when you get enough people together they are governed by their lowest common faculties - which normally means desire and fear. Even investors who knew that the dot com thing was an artificial bubble would jump on the bandwagon, because if you could get out soon enough, you could really clean up nicely. Likewise, you don't have to believe that SCO has any chance in hell of winning, you just have to gamble on the greed of many other people and hope that it might cause enough noise to get you rich before it bursts.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
It is not the end. You cannot just replace the code retroactively. There has been a lot of people who have made money off of that code. They would need some sort of reperations. That would get messy and would hurt Linux's adoption rate.
That's my worry. What I'm afraid will happen is that somewhere in the mess of Project Monterey and Sequent/IBM's Unix licenses (and the Dynix transition from BSD- to Unix-based) there will be a shred of I.P. that's judged to be a misappropriated, how can SCO be compensated for the "damage?"
A judge facing this quandry might give in to SCO's request for money from every Linux user.
...when your business is only good for getting people karma on slashdot.
The most important thing about the stock market is that you can sell your shares at any time, for the going rate. This means that it isn't necessary for a company to have any real value at all (in terms of paying dividends) to have a stock that will make you money. SCO has demonstrated that they can impress the market. Even if everybody agrees that SCO will be out of business in 3 years, it's a good bet that SCOX will go up at some point before then.
SCO's chances in court are unrelated to the value of SCOX. SCOX is a good deal at $10 today if it can be sold for $11 some time next week. SCO's PR only matters to the value of SCOX because it matters to the people who might buy SCOX from you later.
Add to this Apple's announcements of the G5 RAID and Xserves this week, Linux as a server is pretty much dead anyway, so I think migrating away from Linux as a "geektop" OS is inevitable.
Face it guys, Linux has no future. The future is Apple.
They sucked as well. Ramone brothers rule!
We have not forgotten anything. You may have forgotten love for free (not as in beer) software. I have used linux since version 0.99, just upgrading to 2.6.0, and have seen it evolve over the years. It is probably the most sincere software product out there, written and maintained by dedicated people, who genuinely are proud of, and have fun in what they are doing. Just follow the kernel mailing list discussions.
Others have already commented on the SCO stock price. I think you are forgetting that the stock market speculators and many business people just do no understand free software. Anybody thinking that if SCO wins they can collect any money at all is truely clueless. They will certainly not get any money for the 60 or so machines I admin AND they will continue to run linux! They just do not understand that you can write good software for the fun of it and give it away and make some money on supporting it (or let others make money by supporting it, if you happen to be more interested in moving on).
This whole thing is just a gamble thing for clueless business people who we should just ignore, they will become more irrelevant as linux's market share rises. Also don't forget that the volumes in which SCO stock trades are not very high, we are not talking about a lot of money for professional speculators. Until this is over we should just have fun in using and programming for linux and enjoy the freedom to look at, change and enhance the source code.
The one positive thing this has brought us is that apparently a moloch like IBM has found it possible to change and have decided instead of simply buying SCO to fight it.
In general, people need ideals to hold on to. Speculation on a stock like SCO is done by folks who either believe that SCO is right or who think SCO is wrong but the system will back them anyways. Have we forgotten the .com boom? People speculated in this era for the same reasons. Either they believed a .com was going to kick ass or they were just riding the bandwagon hoping to make some easy cash. Irresponsible investing only benefits the people who already control the wealth.
What we have not yet learned is this... Investing in a stock because you believe in the company is what makes the stock market work. This leads to a good economy with respectable companies. Speculating on a company you don't understand or don't believe in leads to economic trouble for everyone and unscrupulous companies are allowed to rise to power.
What can we do to help the SCO case right now? I don't know. But for the long run we need to ensure our elected officials and mutual fund managers understand what makes a solid economy. Speak your mind with your money and your vote.
...but I do take issue with one thing. Stock price is no indication of a successful or strategically positioned company or business plan.
I work for a telecom that went bankrupt. Just prior to merger, our stock price went through the roof. Many thought we had this great business plan that was going to be incredibly profitable--or at least that's what you'd think from a stock that tripled in value in a very short period of time. To make a long story short...Last month we emerged from Bankruptcy. There was a point at which the investors started to see the company was not going to make it. Much was written about our chances of success being slim, but yet there were several times at which our stock price still went up. In fact, during our period of bankruptcy--when it was known upon exiting of Chapter 11 our stock value would be ZERO, our stock still traded, up a few cents down a few cents.
So while your point about investors buying the stock under the assumption that it will go up is true. They don't necessarily buy the stock assuming it will go up as a result of the activities of the company.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
"The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools"
;-)
Right... explain to use the dot-com era then, eh?
Stock market history is filled with investors who had absolutely no idea what they were doing, because the companies or technologies they invested in were either entirely made of lies or simply not what the investors hoped it would be. These are, after all, stock market investors, and not technologists or lawyers who actually understand what they're investing in - just the press releases and marketing geared towards them.
Granted, it's entirely possible SCO does have some secret trump card. I'm doubting it, but it does still seem a bit foolish to write them off entirely until they are completely gone.
One thing to remember, is that the SCO stock price is based upon absolutely nothing. It even went *up* on the negative news of SCO having to give IBM discovery evidence.
There *are no* fundamentals for this stock.
SCO no longer has a product.
SCO no longer has any customers willing to stick around except for the few who absolutely need legacy software.
SCO has totally blown its future market, c.f., "we view contracts as something to use against our customers"
What has inflated SCOX's price?
1. Market manipulators painting the stock price during low volume.
2. Shills on MSNBC and elsewhere promoting the stock with bad information.
3. Darl & Co's "let's put out a press release every time the stock sags". "Journalists" eat this up and quote them in MSNBC and Forbes.
4. This is the most important one. Short interest. There is so much short interest right now that there are few stocks to be borrowed at all to short. SCOX is shorted up the ass. With no supply of stocks to buy or short, the price gets driven up.
Is the price up because anyone thinks that SCOX has any case against IBM? Nope. The discussion on Yahoo's SCOX bulletin board consists of two sides: pumpers and dumpers. The dumpers usually argue (99 percent of the time) with facts culled from Groklaw and other places. The "strong buys" are nothing but "sound and fury signifying nothing"
Those of you who are kicking yourselves for not buying SCOX in March shouldn't feel left out. This stock is only good for day traders and gamblers. The question is not *whether* the stock will tank, but *when*.
--
BMO
...if the offending code is immediately removed upon legal notification that it is infringing, SCO will have a hard time collecting any damages. Absent a patent issue, the OSS community can rewrite this smallish chunk of code from scratch in little time. SCO understands this, which is why it tried so hard to keep from identifying specific infringing code.
But this situation makes it clear that SCO can recover NO significant damages from such alleged copyright infringement, and delay won't change that. Failing to identify the infringement doesn't increase SCO's redress, it just delays the start of the "collect damages starting from this point" clock. The net period and payout, in the unlikely event, are still minimal.
I still subscribe to the "they're smoking crack" theory.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
This is merely discovery phase, until January 11 we won't even know what SCo's specific complaints are (and SCO could reply to many requests in motion to compel with affidavits stating why they can't answer). You've forgotten that thus far this is the legal equivalent of two dogs sniffing each other's hind ends. It will be very much to SCO's advantage to drag things out even more and raise all kinds of convoluted issues. The party is just getting started, and the stock price will rise even more over the next few months. This surprises you?
One thing I've thought about is this:
As I recall its a crime to threaten someone with a lawsuit for the purposes of affecting their behavior unless you really intend to file suit. I've often wondered if it could be proven that SCO's letters to Linux users fell into that category.
I've also wondered if any action could be taken by the Bar Association against SCO's lawyers, given their financial arrangements with SCO and the ethics of pursuing a case that doesn't actually have any evidence.
Disclaimer: I'm a programmer not a lawyer, and I'm not even a very good programmer...
Even better, here's Red Hat versus SCO:
Chart: RedHat versus SCO
What does this mean? Well, I never allow the market to determine whether a company is valuable or not, but if the market is telling us something, it is that SCO doesn't look good this year.
Remember if McBride is right, then SCO and Red Hat can't both survive. That's why Red Hat took them to court. So, if you judge things by the whims of the market (always a mistake, mind you), the market is betting on Red Hat.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Even a six month analysis of the stock price shows steady growth from about ten dollars to seventeen
Actually, the stock has vacillated between $13 and $18 since June, peaking with each new press release from SCO, dropping with press releases from IBM and RedHat, and otherwise moving relative to the rest of the tech stocks.
If the judge finds that IMB's contibutes to linux are "derivative works", all bets are off. Granted, it would take a broad interpretation for that conclusion to come to pass and would greatly depend upon how skillfully that argument is presented.
Given the apparent (lack of) skill level in some of the legal language in and among the crap being spewed by SCO, I'd SWAG odds at 5:1 against that being sucessfully done. The killer point about this is that it's all out of our hands.
"The waiting is the hardest part" -- TP & THBs
Has everyone forgotten the dot era so soon? With the right hype. You can drive the stock price up to insane levels. This is exactly what SCO has done. What you should really look at is what SCO insiders are doing.
s /8 3193.asp8 /12.html
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Aug/08122003/busines
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/2003/0
http://lwn.net/Articles/40063/
Hmm they appear to be selling like crazy.
IANALBIPOOGL (I am not a Lawyer, but I play one on GrokLaw.)
Since SCO recently received a $50 million dollar cash infusion, what's to stop them from siphoning off some of that money into phony investment accounts? These accounts could then purchase SCOX in small batches, enough to keep the share price in the $15-20 range while the insiders sell out.
Damn, wrong stock symbol. But I expect to be right soon enough.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Just an observation, but to say that the smart money is buying SCOX ignores the shorts. The short ratio is 7.8 which is the largest I've ever seen on a stock (I'm not a big stock trader, so that doesn't mean much.) 27% of the float is short as well. Although someone with money has been buying this stock, there are a bunch of shorts out there too. It's all a wash if you ask me.
"The time is always now" - Victor
What SCO is missing (as opposed to us) is that, when a business changes names/hands, all the old actions don't just magically disappear - they can't disavow Caldera's contributions to linux.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Check his history ... regular history of trolling like this
Investors are STUPID. They don't know that SCO is full of shit. So they buy SCO stock and get rich!
My other car is first.
The names of all those dot-bombs whose stock went up incredibly, driven by the enthusiasm of the same investors who are now buying SCO.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
OK, you're worried because SCO stock valuation is very high and you wonder if investors could somehow knows something we've forgotten.
In one word: bullshit! Or more politely, your fears are unfounded.
Do you remember the "Internet bubble"? Why was the valuation of Internet companies ridiculously high?
Sure, some gullible person really believed in the "Internet economy", but mostly it was because the investors were playing the 'hot potatoe' gamble..
That is to say: the stock value is increasing very fast, if I buy now and sell before it crashes, I'll have made a huge profit.
Of course like in casino, the hard part is stopping before loosing all your "virtual money"..
IMHO, SCO's investors are playing exactly the same game..
In terms of employees, IBM is 6x bigger than Microsoft.
In terms of revenue, IBM is almost 3x bigger than Microsoft.
In terms of revenue per share, IBM is almost 15x bigger than Microsoft.
IBM is the worlds' largest software company, not Microsoft. It's just that IBM bundles their software w. services and hardware.
"This gives us [five days] to make sure that when the IBM lawyer marches into court he has a spring in his step, knowing that he has every Linux user on the planet behind him."
IBMs lawyers don't give a shit what Linux users think because it will have no effect on the outcome.
One thing that concerns me is that the judge will not know anything about source code or software development and will not be able to make a fair determination of what constitutes derivative works in this case. Please correct me if I am missing something.
Bench's annual report filed on Dec 15th doesn't seem to match with his activity over the last year. It only lists 7000 shares sold, when he sold that many in some months alone. I count 38,900 shares sold and 4000 acquired during the year (net 34900). SEC needs to review these filings IMHO.
[The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools and something unknown to Slashdot readers made the SCO stock price rise by 2.4%, on December 26th, over half a days trading] True, but have you checked the short interest on the stock - also a very good indicator of direction. There are over 2 million shares shorted from a total of almost 14 million outstanding - that's over 14% - a very high short percentage. So those smarty pants on wall-street that are pump-pumping the stock may well have either hedged their positions wisely or a lot of the same traders betting on a long drop with a quick stop.
Not a chance.
The reason is that SCO can't afford the burn rate. They have to go for a quick win: they're burning through more than $10 million a year in legal expenses on top of several a million a year in operating losses. Their latest round of financing included clauses that make further equity financing nearly impossible, and they have less than $40 million in the bank.
Bottom line: this sucker is going to be over, one way or another, in less than three years because SCO can't afford to keep it going any longer.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
More to the point, market caps are misleading.
This only tells you what people are willing to pay for a stock. Enron, the day before their collapse seemed invincible. (I know, the collapse was somewhat gradual, but non-the-less.)
This was touched on by people higher in the story, but in many cases, stock prices rise, not because the company has and brings value, but simply because someone else is willing to buy the stock for more. This is how ponzi schemes work. They "work" great as long as things are going up. When the weight of the fraud crashes, though, it's murder.
IMHO, IBM has much more intrinsic value and brings said value to the shareholders and company. MS, on the other hand, has loads of people who are willing to pay inflated prices for the stock.
In short, Market Caps may be an easy metric to use, but not very valueable.
Cheers,
Greg
i forgot to invest my life savings in sco, make tons of money, and donate the profits back to the open source community. =)
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
What we have forgotten is to sue Canopy for fraud. They are the true winners in this whole exercise (along with MS). Perhaps if SEC / Groklaw /IBM and the world were to concentrate on the activities if this Medusa-like organisation the puppeteers would be brought to a terminal halt.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
It is official; Netcraft confirms: SCO is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SCO UnixWare community when IDC confirmed that SCO market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SCO UnixWare has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SCO is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SCO's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SCO faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SCO UnixWare because SCO is dying. Things are looking very bad for SCO. As many of us are already aware, SCO UnixWare continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
SCO has lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time UnixWare developers L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: SCO is dying.
All major surveys show that UnixWare has steadily declined in market share. SCO is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SCO is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. SCO continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, SCO is dead.
http://saveie6.com/
Regardless of the details, there is a fundamental flaw in your method: you have assumed that the fair price of something is the same as the expected discounted future value. (You didn't mention the "discounted" part, but let's say that ommission was an approximation.) In essence, you have assumed that you can set a fair value by integrating over all possible future prices. This won't work unless you substitute the "risk-neutral" density function for the "real" probability density in your integration. The bottom line is that excess risk always requires excess expected value in the price.
Here is an example. Let's say that you know, with absolute certainty (God told you) that SCO has a 20% chance of bankrupting within a year. Let's say that you can earn 2% lending money to the federal government ("risk-free") for a year. The risk-free future value of $100 is therefore $102, and to break even you would have to charge SCO $102/0.8 = $127.5 1 year from now for $100 today. SCO would find that it is unable to borrow money on these terms - it would have to pay an interest rate significantly in excess of 27.5% to borrow money. Lenders demand to be paid for taking on the risk of default - the "market price of risk." That is the reason that companies like SCO issue equity, not debt.
The default probability that you back out of a market price for debt is therefore always higher than what the market thinks is the real default probability.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
is that this is not real money, unless you sell now to some other victim.
Stock market bubbles, and pyramid schemes are quite common. Nobody really makes money except those that started them.
You could look back and say "if I bought then, and sold then, I would have made loads of money."
But how do you know when to sell. It is going to collapse at some point. When? Who knows?
SCO fails the "Dad's good bet" test MISERABLY--and as such it is NOT a reliable investment (more on that below). It is of course wise to be diligent in looking for any "ace up the sleeve" that SCO may have. However it is too soon after the .com bubble for most to forget that stock price means little to nothing about how well a company operates, and even less about its future prospects.
.com bubble because these companies had NO "STUFF" to back their huge valuations--only business plans, expenses and ad campaigns. They held no real estate, had no inventory, not even significant intellectual property (proprietary software, patents, licensing deals and so on). If a stock looks interesting, make sure it's backed by some TRUE value
My father is recently retired and in the past few years has invested a portion of his savings in stocks, mainly on TSX (Toronto exchange). My father and koreth (author of the parent post) are two of very few people who seem aware of the "interesting fact" regarding stock funds performance against market indeces.
In the stock market, it seems generally to be a VERY BAD IDEA to make investments based heavily on the forecasts on market conditions and the performances of key industres and so on. My dad has had the most long term success by almost completely IGNORING trends forecasts proclaimed by the "experts" and looking at a companies current and past performance vs. its stock valuation. Some criteria are:
1. REAL assets vs capitalisation - Dad never bought into the whole
2. Is the company making money. Dad looks at the whole TSE and on the first pass he drops EVERYTHING that doesn't meed a certain PE ratio as a safe investment, REGARDLESS of what headlines they are making or press releases they are making. Dad didn't get into BRE-X for a reason--they were making headlines about a big gold find but WERE MAKING NO REVENUE YET. The find turned out to be a scam and those who gambled too long lost it all.
3. Do they issue dividends...that is a bonus...and if they do re-invest the dividends they issue back into more of the same stock. You can set it up so essentially you get shares instead of cash and you can avoid brokerage fees.
Pretty simple...and you hold everything you buy until you need to cash out or a periodic review of your investments fails to pass all your criteria. DO NOT let fluctuations in stock price--up OR down--scare you into buying or selling, EXCEPT when said fluctuation causes the stock to move outside the criteria you set as a good investment bet.
Everything else is a gamble--invest your lottery ticket money in it and nothing else.
BTW SCO fails MISERABLY as a safe investment--it fails 1. as its assets are currently next to worthless in comparison to its market valuation--and the only thing that'll change that is winning the IBM case, AND commandeering BSD since Linux users would likely move en-masse to BSD should Linux become expensive and closed. Very inlikely. It fails 2 because it doesn't make NEARLY enough revenue to pass the PE ratio test. AND because if 2. it can't do 3--pay any sort of meaningful dividend.
Remember: this all started as a way to get IBM to buy SCO. The unexpected problem was IBM thinking of the longterm and declining the quickfix solution of a buyout.
By the time that became obvious SCO's stock price had soared. That leaves SCO management with a sticky problem,
1: give up
2: watch the stock collapse
3: get sued by their stockholders
OR
1: brazen it out
2: lose the case
3: SCO go bankrupt
4: management look for new jobs but might not get sued
Darl & friends know they personally lose badly if they quit the case so it can't happen.
If you look here you'll find a wonderful book called "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". It chronicles many different financial and social schemes and trends which, in the end, amounted to nothing. My favorite story in the book (and maybe one of the more applicable here) is about speculation in tulips in fifteenth century Holland. While I'm not going to say that SCO's stock price is nothing but a delusion, it wouldn't be hard to make a case for it. People are greedy, people often make decisions rashly or for the short term, and people follow crowds. SCO stock wouldn't be the first thing or the last to be valued only due to speculation, and short term gains in stocks (such as 2.4% dec 26th) can be caused by a change in the weather, not any actual news or information. There is potential value in SCO stock - they could take their 5% chance of winning and turn it into a billion dollars - and perhaps the stock price reflects only that, peoples valuation of it as a lottery ticket. Perhaps the fervor of the speculation will push it to 50, like the tulips, or perhaps people will finally come to their senses and the price will bottom out even before a trial.
I don't think it's what they know; Rather, it's what they don't: IMHO not many people who deal stock for a living actually read /., or other "grass-root" publications. They read "serious" magazines or web sites, and the kind of press SCO has been getting there is very encouraging...
SCOX is rising on a wave of disinformation, carried forth by people who don't have a clue not because they're stupid, but because SCO runs an extremely well-managed PR campaign.
and still be first post? :-)
Anyone forget about India and South Africa?
That short selling is not a safe bet. If you are certain some stock will tank for reasons of your own, and somebody with deep pockets wants to hurt you, they can get involved overtly or covertly and pump up the price until you have to meet a margin call at the new, higher price, and they will ruin you.
How many open sourcers have been ruined already because they figured the bottom line was SCO's _case_? I'd be very interested to know.
In spy thrillers John Le Carre called this sort of thing a 'honey trap'. Oh, look, what a wonderful opportunity! Look how unreasonable the situation is! Short me, short me!
Look a step farther to see who benefits from that stock artificially held up. Who benefits from margin calls ruining inexperienced OSS investors? Who benefits from SCO presenting the appearance of valuation, month after month, appearing more and more valuable in spite of what happens and what they're up against, viz. IBM?
No points for the answer. Somebody with deep pockets and a long history of being willing to try anything. This is a pretty smart tactic, though it's costly. You can't buy this kind of disruption through just throwing money at marketing and/or journalists.
It would be interesting to see the money trail traced, though it might be difficult.
Just to take exception:
"Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb."
- Dark Helmet
Its all the good-wannebe's who are "still" dumb, but they'll wise up under good-tutoring or go evil; and all later be replaced by the next generation.
Evils triumph will be no more than the size of the land it can sit on.
If you are choosing to invest in a company, from between company X and company Y, you should examine Market Cap. If X has a share price of say $1 and Y has a share price or $100, you might be tempted to buy X because it seems to have room to grow(it only a buck per share). However if X has a market cap of 300 billion, chances are its not going up 20% anytime soon. And if Y had a market cap of 10 million and you thought it a promising company you would think the market cap has room to grow. You cannot take Market Cap at absolute face value but you should always look at it.
Here's what we may have forgotten:
Investors are stupid. Really stupid. For example, during the height of the dot-com boom, people actually thought it was a good idea to buy stock in **yet** **another** company dedicated to creating a new web brand for selling pet products or toys or whatever -- completely forgetting about the fact that established brick-and-mortar brands have been recognized and trusted by consumers for decades. Overnight, hoardes of investors just assumed that all the laws of marketing and consumer behavior had been repealed because of the birth of the Internet. They got the massive bust they so richly deserved. But more importantly, they demonstrated in a very clear way just how much stupidity still reigns supreme.
Rest assured, you slashdot types have MUCH more insight about SCO than the average investor. SCOX is up because it's in the tech sector, and the tech sector is up. Period. You're just watching sheep follow other sheep, where the lead sheep are too stupid and lazy to do the real research needed to figure out if they're even wandering in the right direction.
The idiots who fueled the dot-com fiasco haven't disappeared. They still walk among us. They haven't gotten any smarter. And they're out there buying SCO stock without a clue what SCO does.
I think that all we're missing is that if the matter goes to court, then anything could happen. Well, I don't mean literally anything; but even though it looks to us (/. readers) like SCO doesn't have much in the way of facts on their side, they could still win their case. The legal system can get very complicated, very quickly and cases will often hinge on small bits of legal minutia that baffle even skilled lawyers, let alone IANAL outsiders. Every time you enter a court room you're taking a big risk.
As to the investors that are buying based on the chance element of the legal system, as others have pointed out, it's basically a bet. They might loose all their money, but if they win, they win big.
So, on 11/24, Barron's discusses Deutsche Bank's buy recommendation on SCO and notes that
...??
"For investors, the high level of animosity towards SCO is almost validating, though. It shows SCO has a realistic chance to really muck up the works for Linux, making the stock a high-risk speculation with a potentially huge payoff."
suggesting that all of the outrage on sites like slashdot is an indicator of the validity of SCO's case. Then, today, we get the little bit of reasoning containted in this post. Apparently SCO's rising stock price is reason for techies to be really concerned about the validity of SCO's claims. Hold it! I thought the concern on slashdot was a justification for the stock price
Duh. The truth is that proprietary source code was added to Linux and those who did it are guilty of copyright violation. Let's not overthink this. Get your zealot head out of your ass and realize the truth. I'm so sick of this bullcrap argument.
I'm still laughing at all the overconfident zealots claiming shorting SCO when it was under $10 was a good idea.
If anything I'd say it's slashdot and groklaw that has brought "many eyes" to the situation.
Investors tend to work alone - certainly more alone than the many dedicated, knowledgeable people who are putting in the hard yards at groklaw. Sure, the groklaw people have a bias - everyone does in this world - but if SCO was really correct I think by now the effort would be going in to fixing Linux rather than trying to bluster.
I'm stil enjoying the quasiregular 'slashdot comedy hour' but I've long since given up on the idea that SCO has anything worthwhile, otherwise they'd have landed their killer punch by now - I think the investors have just plain got it wrong. It happens.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Since SCO is not widely traded, MS-backed institutional trades drive up the price.
No big surprise there.
I just want to know when the SEC or the FTC is going to haul out the brickbats and make an example of the jackasses running this pathetic charade.
Even slashdot (and we?) are falling prey to resonance cascade of inane media hype.
Steve
the point of DRM isn't that your rights need management - it's that the people who hold the copyrights on the music/movies/software/data you use want your (legal) rights. DRM is about taking those rights by stealth - once they've taken them, they need to have them "managed" so that you can't take them back. Thieves need really good locks, after all, to protect them from their victims. DRM reverses the "theft" analogy - copyright infringers using music, etc. they haven't gotten permission to use are thieves but those who take the rights given by copyright law and who profit from the theft (who essentially stripmine public property and then sell both the products made from the land and the use of the land back to you) are just and righteous people.
This is probably the point you were making - I simply concurred with the spirit of your sig.
You can't just short a stock and ride it indefinitely, no matter how out of the money your short is until it comes back into the money.
Sure you can, if you do your math up front and make sure you have plenty of room to avoid margin calls. I've held shorts for over a year (for tax reasons) with no problems. But that's because I researched the margin rules and figured out my worst to best case strategies before I ever placed an order.
Making money on the collapse of a bubble is all about timing.
No, it's all about doing the math. You're almost always better off taking the time to do your homework rather than trying to time the market, with the possible exception of no-brainer arbitrage oportunities.
-- MarkusQ
Enron is actually an excellent example.
Better yet, look closely at the penny stock market. I learned (the hard way) about pump and dump schemes up front and close - enough to earn the t-shirt "I sold my company for $10 million and all I got was this crummy t-shirt." SCO's gameplaying is quite impressive, compared to the dozens of schisters I've met in the penny stock market, but the strategy is the same.
1. Obtain control of an essentially worthless publically trading shell or company.
2. Issue major amounts of stock to your group. This can be done through acquisitions of worthless private corporations your friends own (XYZ Corp acquired by EmptyShell, terms not disclosed - kind of thing), through issuing of warrents/options, etc. Lots of ways to load up.
3. Start the PR spin on why EmptyShell is going to be the next big thing. This often is done with acquisition, though increasingly it's done with the threat of litigation. Look at Leftbid and its bogus claim of owning patent rights to the technology used by Ebay. The Leftbid organization was an empty shell, run by an individual who controlled over a half dozen such shells. While Leftbid and all the other shells are dead (and over $100 million in creditor claims ignored from all the companies this fellow has run), this fellow pocketed over $30 million in less than ten years.
4. Pump releases to PR Newswire, BusinessWire, etc.
5. Dump shares as the stock moves up.
6. Reload/repeat until the shell is worthless, creditors are closing in, investigations going, etc.
7. Dump any assets the company has, illegally if necessary. Creditors will go away if there is nothing to collect. (The funniest trick here is to find a shill within one of the operating companies to put everything in their names. Have them sign the checks, list them on the payrolll filings as manager, and even give them a big promotion as you're wiring all the money to that Bermuda account. When the investigators come, guess who they'll pin the payroll tax liability and other matters on? Not you! Best of all, it'll take these pour fools countless thousands of legal bills to fight off the IRS while you're sailing on your 25 meter ship)
8. Ignore courts, lawsuits, and investigators. Stall, lie, claim you were just another investor who "lost millions" and was taken like all the rest. Claim all the company documentation got lost in a fire or sent to a warehouse and nobody knows where it went. Laugh at the Enron fools who didn't burn the documentation fast enough.
9. Brag at the local country club that the FBI, IRS and SEC can't touch you. (Being on the other side of this, I'm afraid it's right. We were repeatedly told by SEC officials that we should complain to our congressperson because the SEC was underfunded and couldn't investigate all these smaller guys. FBI's response was "we're not a response agency. IRS asmusingly went after the small fry it could intimidate and weren't smart enough to obtain legal representation, in spite of piles of documentation provided that pointed to the crooks. Path of least resistance).
Promises are made that SCO will be buried and that McBride will find himself in prison, yet they are still there and McBride is still in charge.
And this will not change. Don't be fooled by McBride's tech stupidity. He's paid his dues to the system by hiring David Boies, and Boies has already greased the political skids. When David makes money, the pols make money. Surprised that Hatch's name comes up? Why else do you think they hired Boies, if not for his party connectedness (and don't assume for a second that either party has a monopoly on this game).
The men and women who play the stock market on a regular basis are no fools
This was the hardest thing to learn: there are a large amount of folks who know the game being played. Their greed drives them to pile on to the game, hoping they'
For those who havn't read the book, the wizzards first rule is thus: "People Are Stupid."
Every dollar made in the stock market represents two people who lost fifty cents each. Like most of our economy, the Stock Market is a confidence scam. Oh for about forty years there, after the end of The Depression, there "had to be value" behind stocks. Then "Intellectual Property" came along and the marketing of vapor and pipe-dreams was re-introduced to the mainstream.
I am actually surprised that the stock hasn't moved *more*. Considering the number of timid sheep out there, I am surprised that lots of companies didn't pay SCO just to settle their onw indigestion.
People are Stupid.
The Law is an Ass.
Only the presence of a five-star opponent (IBM) has kept this from being just nearly the worst thing to happen to "Intellectual Property" in this country since its inception.
As long as no trier-of-fact has a brain hemmorage, this is just an aftershock of the people who learned how to manage money in the late ninties.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
And your evidence of this would be...? Oh, that's right, all you have to do is make the claim, there's no need to prove it.
Darl McBride, executive, dead at 55
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - assman Darl McBride was found dead in his Salt Lake City home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to lawsuit production. Truly an American icon.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
For this reason, I don't consider the stock market some grand adjudicator of truth. When you say, "look at all the people who invested" I say "but look who didn't."
We keep assuming everyone is smart and in the know like /.'ers. And as the ol' saying goes, "Assumptions are the mother of all f*ck ups."
Of course, with all the smoke and mirrors (the forbidden word paradox, in this case, the "forbidden" code that's never mentioned officially), many investors don't know what the hell they've stepped in. Hopefully, they will smell it soon.
I suspect this is just part of the whole business cycle where investment diverges more and more from reality until poeple do some utterly stupid things and and a crash occurs.
This whole thing has been about emotional issues while we've been trying to put a technical slant on it - but technical methods, like the code and the letter of the law, don't matter in this case, it's all about giving people confidence in SCO to trade their shares. A lot of the people we are dealing with confuse both the academic method and christian charity with communism, so that makes mutaul understanding a whole lot harder.
nothing.
What has the market forgotton
IBM
or they hope to sell right before the stock crashes.
The rise of the stock price reflects some interesting behavior of the financial markets. When Linux, Open Source, and especially Apache started to unfold as an important development in the software world, the financial markets reacted by pushing RedHat and VALinux through the roof. The jewels of the Open Source movement were getting the kind of press that money could rarely buy - it was clearly new, clearly something that was going to be around, and clearly something that you would want to invest in, if you could just find a place to do so.
Turn the clock forward to 2003 or 2004 and you see a lot of press generated once again about the fate of Linux, Open Source, and the GPL. It's still critically important software and still an elusive one to invest in directly. With all the SCO press, there's no question that SCO attracts investor interest not through the rightness of what they're saying, but because it looks like a good place to put down a bet. If SCO prevails, then they'll collect big bucks and you win. If IBM or some other major finally just gets pissed off at wasting time on legal wrangling, then they'll likely make some sort of licensing agreement with SCO and again you win. The only way that you lose is if it really goes the legal route and SCO loses. Then you get wiped, but the chances of it really going that way are probably pretty low given the way that SCO has positioned themselves.
You know the punchline of this old joke "We already know what you are; now we're just haggling about the price." I think this is the expectation of the financial community - at some point, IBM or a consortium of Linux companies will probably make a one shot payment to SCO and it will all be over. It's just a question of what the dollar amount and final agreement look like, and it's done.
OK, so if you had invested your life savings at a dollar, you'd be rich today... so don't make the same mistake again-- the oportunity still exists!
Just short the stock at 20, and cover when it goes back to a buck (or gets delisted)
You KNOW it is coming.
jrjBlog
Ok, it're REALLY Off-topic, but I've come across a very peculiar detail about SCOs trade name "SCOX"
s hax.asp
From: http://www.deliriumsrealm.com/delirium/mythology/
Dictionnaire Infernal - Collin de Plancy (1863) - paraphrased
As duke and high marquis of hell, Scox/Chax commands 30 legions. He appears as a stork with a raucous voice, and is known to be deceitful. He steals horses, and takes the silver in the houses he possesses only to return it 1200 years later if everything is still in order. If he is confined to a triangle, he will speak truth on supernatural matters, point out hidden treasures not guarded by evil spirits, and obey the exorcist. If he is not confined, he will lie and not always obey the exorcist.
We in North America live in an era of crypto-fascism, where a shareholder will proxy his vote to put a bullet through a baby's head, just to get another dollar of share price.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
FYI, the Nephites were from a lost tribes of Isreal that came to America on a submarine a few thousand years ago.
The submariners were Jaredites, who supposedly came straight from the Tower of Babel. Nephi and friends just had an unremarkable ship. Also, in the traditional interpretation the Lamanite ancestors all came on Nephi's ship; it wasn't until people examined Native American DNA that the idea of unmentioned Siberian-descended Lamanite groups became popular.
The Utah Court system is SCO's ace in the hole.
Not yet, it isn't. Judge Wells certainly doesn't seem to have a pro-SCO prejudice, and at the rate the McBrides are going the case may never make it to a jury trial. Even if it gets that far and SCO's lawyers somehow manage to get a biased jury, Novell has as much of a "hometown Utah company" appearance as SCO does, and based on their statements and copyright filings Novell looks like they're going to bat for our side.
Regardless, I would be worried about shorting SCO or any penny stock from Utah, as Provo Stocks have certain irrational characteristics.
I'd be worried about shorting SCO because every stock (especially every thinly traded stock) has certain irrational characteristics. If there are suckers out there who will pay $20 a share for SCO, how do I know there aren't suckers who would pay $40 a share?
>Who's bigger: IBM (according to finance.yahoo.com)
You forgot one little thing...
IBM's Market Cap is 160.10B
Microsoft's is 305.34B
That means Microsoft has a lot more money to burn through...
A couple of things. The market value of SCO already includes the probability of winning the case against IBM.
So in that case, investing in SCO is like buying insurance on your investments in companies who's fortunes are related to open-source.
SCO's share price is still really cheap compared to the value that they would get if they won their suit. So if I owned a ton of shares of Redhat or SuSE or IBM (for example) I could purchase a smaller number of SCO shares. If SCO wins the suit, I wouldn't lose any money!
If SCO loses the suit, the money would pretty much go to zero, but that's no different then what happens to the money you pay for car insurance if you don't get into an accident.
So no one thinks SCO will really win, they just want to be covered in the event that it does.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That bulls are cows and cows are heard animals.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
What have we forgotten?
It's simple. The contributors to the Linux kernel have forgotten to file a high-profile class-action countersuit against SCO for copyright infringement. Every person who has contributed original code to the Linux kernel can sue SCO for copyright infringement if SCO sells their copyrighted code for profit because the GPL does not specifically renounce claims to copyright. This would be software piracy. Because each person has only contributed a small portion of the code, an individual lawsuit against SCO is unprofitable after paying the legal bills. However, a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit is another matter.
For maximum effect, the lawsuit must not be filed quietly. When the lawsuit is filed, a press release should be prepared and sent to all major media organisations in the U.S. and select ones from other countries. Chances are some media organisations will report this lawsuit as news. Once this lawsuit is filed, people will think twice about buying SCO stock and the stock price will start to fall. If institutional investors decide the stock isn't worth the risk, the stock price will crash so hard it will leave a crater.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
...but only in the long term. Short to medium term, anything can (and does) happen. Case in point: Rambus. They tried extorting money from every DRAM maker on the planet on the strength of bogus patents (they retconned the impending DRAM standard into their pending patent application), and their stock price quadrupled over a month when the Japanese capitulated. Infineon told'em to Get Fucked, and RMBS dropped like a stone.
Another case: Aureal. In early 2000, they were languishing at $3 when they announced they were writing a Linux driver for their sound cards, whereupon the stock hit $9 within a week. A few months later, their financials revealed that sales went up by $18 million, but so did losses. The stock dropped by 57% that day, to be worth pennies when the company shut down the following week.
In other words, if I were to form a company and sell you a share for a buck, if the share goes up to $10.00, I don't get the other $9.00.
That's one reason why market cap means nothing. If the company owns ALL the shares, it means nothing because it isn't being traded (hence no market capitalization - it's private) . If, on the other hand, it owns none of the shares, market capitalization again has no bearing on how much money the company currently has in the bank. IBMs revenue stream is almost 3x that of Microsoft. So, who has more cash flow, more employees, and better karma? IBM is, by any measure, several times Microsofts' size, as I pointed out.
Do you have to sell it when the time comes? Or can you cancel the sell?
What's to prevent a company from "registering" future sells for the next 50 years, and then dumping when they want?
A put option would be better, but it would have to be OTC (there are no exchange traded options for SCOX) and again, it is probably too illiquid to do anything, so nobody will write that option for you.
Whenexamine the SCO affair with a cold analytical eye I can't help but be worried. Over the last twelve months the SCO stock price has climbed from just over a dollar to nearly eighteen dollars and at its peak it was well over twenty dollars. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and if I had invested my life savings in SCO stock last Christmas I would now be a multi-millionaire, examining which speedboat to buy instead of which bills to pay. Even a six month analysis of the stock price shows steady growth from about ten dollars to seventeen, a strange situation for a company which is supposed to be on its last legs. For years I had a friend who worked in the petroleum industry as a deep sea diver. Deep sea diving is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet and when you looked at Matt's desk the first thing you saw was a wooden sign asking 'what have I forgotten?' When you are three hundred feet down the last thing you want is to find out you have forgotten an important tool, it's bad news all round. Matt lived to a ripe old age so I suspect that the sign worked. We all need to ask the same question about the SCO affair, what have we forgotten?"
By the way, Apple is also a lap dog for Microsoft that they keep around only so that they can argue that they are not a monopoly.
Then it's a pretty poorly-trained lapdog that bites the hand that feeds it and piddles on the new rug.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
This is the Achilles heal of open source. SCO is not attacking on this grounds (not directly at least) but if any big company did, Open Source would go underground and all Open Source would quickly have license info removed and authorship attribution removed as developers get scared. This is what Microsoft will do as they start to really loose the computer market to Linux. It is going to make the SCO lawsuit look like a walk in the park.
It may be that the MIS departments will get very angry at MS, but their CEO will say, "look, I have a business to run, if you add in the cost of litigation with MS, then Open Source simply doesn't pay." The CEO will not be interested in the 'correctnes' of the Open Source cause.
Maybe the political system in the US will change patent law, but who contributes more to political campaign funds, MS or Open Source?
Phase two, companies in the US and maybe the EU would get scared and give in to Microsoft. But in third world countries, led by China, open source would flourish. Then a large country, probably China, will build a completely unique and unencumbered hardware/software platform (this has already started with Red Linux and the new CPU architecture they are developing.), and the US would loose any vestige of dominance in the computer market. As a new antitrust lawsuit finally gets under way against MS and almost comes to court, the obvious competition from the Chinese system will cause the suit to collapse (again).
Phase three, Twenty years from now the US will be buying all it's computers from China.
Define High and Low before you trade.
You SCO trolls are amusing. Point to a shred of truth!
If you lies were true, why does SCO have to be compelled to show any evidence????????
Duh? Because SCO (you) never had any evidence, will never have any, and will lie through your teeth till the bitter day of reckoning, which is January 23rd.
SCO has broken the law with lies which is why they are being sued by IBM and Red Hat.
Let's not overlook these facts:
UNIX copyrights are held by Novell
UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
SCO has never shown any evidence to a court of law
...the only lemmings which willingly throw themselves from cliffs and into the ocean are the ones driven to do it by documentary-makers out to make a point.
In a similar vein, the only pirhana that will actually strip a cow in seconds are the ones penned up in a short section of river and starved for weeks - and even then, the cow has to be bleeding into the water to set them off. There are also vegetarian pirhana which are visually indistinguishable from their non-rabidly carnivorous ecological cousins.
Applying this principle ("everything you know is wrong") to SCOX: think about the observation that someone has had the resources to prop up their bizarre blackmail scam for a whole year despite the lack of a tangible taint of merit and the clumsiest hick lawyers you ever saw, and let that worry you instead of the glaring deficiencies in their technical arguments.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Microsoft is the only company that could have been interrested in investing 50 Million Dollar into a company that does nothing else then spreading FUD against Linux.
Read the less simplistic analysis a few comments above.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The difference is that buying SCO stock increases the stock price. This provides more incentive for those idiots on the board to continue this charade. Would you still buy auto insurance if you knew that it would increase the risk of you having an accident?
First of all, SCO's case is not necessarily far-fetched. SCO is running two cases, that by popular perception are merged into one. First, it has a contract dispute with IBM. Second, it has a copyright dispute with the Linux community and kernel team. The second dispute has been pretty well debunked by the community, by Groklaw, and similar. We don't need to worry about it directly.
However, it is quite possible that SCO does have a valid claim in the first dispute against IBM. As a community, we do not know the details of the contracts, and it is quite possible one of the contracts has an appropriate loophole. Legally, this claim should not effect anyone outside of SCO and IBM.
However, in reality, there is a painful problem. Since the two issues have been linked closely in the minds of the world, if SCO wins the IBM lawsuit, they will openly state "we were right," and demand royalties. Most people won't understand the difference between the two disputes, and will pay up. The GNU/Linux community will lose a lot of face, and SCO will generate a lot of licensing revenue.
It's certainly a gamble for SCO, but depending on the details of the IBM contract, the odds in the gamble might not be that bad.
At the same time, investors operate on the law of large numbers. If SCO has a 1% chance of being worth 3 billion, it will have a market value of about 30 million. Institutional investors keep large, diverse portfolios, so while each investment like this is a gamble, overall, you lose 99, win 1, and come out ahead. But if you have 500 investments, you're pretty much guaranteed to win a few.
Great, well reasoned response!
okay. is anybody else tired of scrolling through these SCO stories for the funny comments?
i mean... they're a stoner's dream and all, but sorting through all the comments from people who are taking this SCO lawsuit thing seriously is getting tedious.
oh, and to the mod gods: whatever it was that i did to offend you.. i am so sorry.
Ok, I am assuming that you are trying to indicate whay institutional bankers are still investing in SCO, just as Bank of America, et al. were doing with Parmalat up until very recently. But this viewpoint overlooks a large number of issues that I don't see an institutional banker with ANY legal screening missing (you do legal screening of these claims, right?). OK, even without legal screening, some analysts have been saying some interesting things about SCO. IANAL, however, though I read court cases as a hobby.
The first is that the GPL being tested in court doesn't do a darn thing for SCO. Either they lose (and probably go out of business), or they win and face massive lawsuits by Linux kernel developers over copyright infringement. Yes, without the permission from the GPL, it is SCO who is infringing on copyrights not only by IBM and Red Hat, but also Linus Torvalds and THOUSANDS of other contributors.
Secondly, analyists HAVE been saying that these lawsuits undermine SCO's former core competency as a software manufacturer.
Laura DiDio aside, I think analyst reaction to SCOG has NOT been as positive as you make it out to be. And Laura DiDio has claimed that the lack of indemnification is what holds Linux up in the enterprise while failing to mention that no other enterprise OS offers such indemnification. Interestingly Linux as offered by HP now does which should by that measure give them a strong advantage in the marketplace.
Third, SCO did not fare well in the last round of hearings. I have generally used pretrial hearings as a general test of how the judge views issues at hand, and the judge has not reacted well to what IBM has argued are sets of delaying tactics and discovery requests without specific allegations of wrongdoing (i.e. fishing for evidence). SCO will have had 7 months to prepare their response to the discovery request in January, and it will be interesting to see what they do or don't put forth.
Finally, the fact that SCOG was an active contributor and distributor (even after the lawsuit was filed!), they cannot argue that they inadvertantly distributed their trade secrets under the GPL. No one believes that.
SCO IS A BUBBLE. And the SEC is now investigating three banks in conjunction with their handling of Parmalat (including Deutchebank and Bank of America). SCO may be next.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's very simple, really: A lot of people think IBM will ultimately capitulate and buy SCOX out, win or lose. If that happens, then they get paid (i.e., their stock is bought out.) This kind of thing happens on Wall Street all the friggin time.
I find this very interesting:
Bloomberg's SCOX Page - take a look at the number of shares listed in the "Short Interest" box... confidence in SCOX? I think not...
FYI:
Short interest
Total number of shares of a security that investors have sold short and that have not been repurchased to close out the short position. Usually, investors sell short to profit from price declines. As a result, the short interest is often an indicator of the amount of pessimism in the market about a particular security, although there are other reasons to short that are not related to pessimism. For example, hedging strategies for mergers and acquisition as well as derivative positions may involve short sales. -- Taken From the Bloomberg Glossary Pages
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
No. You have completely overlooked 'short selling', which is what is happening with SCOX. Go look at the short stats on SCO. See how the amount of shorting has risen from 33K in May to 2 million in Dec? Gosh, that's a lot of investors who want SCO to tank, dontcha think?
Yaaaaaaay! Go Sunnyvale!
The KY?
If SCO wins against Red Hat and IBM and the case is not appealed (yeah, right): 1. No one (I mean, American companies) on SCO's radar owns up to running Linux for a (very) short period of time - switching instantly to the other software vendors - Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD, QNX, etc. The rest of the world tells SCO to take a hike with their ridiculous licensing fees. 2. Linux programmers remove the infringing code. 3. Hordes of people switch back to Linux. 4. SCO stock has a falling out. If SCO loses against Red Hat and IBM 1. SCO, lawyers and all go to jail for illegal business practices. 2. Hordes of people switch to Linux. 3. SCO stock has a falling out.
Who moved my sig?
We simply start our own company, claiming to have all this IP that SCO is infringing upon. We also publicly claim that SCO has admitted wrongdoing, and that they will settle with us out-of-court by giving us $2bn to drop some battle we are about to win for $5bn.
We then all invest in this new company. The stock price rises because we're all buying it. Because the stock price is rising, every other investor out there jumps on the bandwagon, selling SCO stock because they assume we're going to kick SCO's arse.
SCO stock plummets, burning all those who invested in SCO when its price was high. Our stock rises up through the clouds. About 5 minutes before we are ordered to prove that SCO has violated our IP, we all sell our stock and our company folds, burning the other half of the investors who were dumb enough to invest in our company based on nothing but talk.
Net result: SCO gone. Us rich. Stupid investors poor. Some investors have learned their lesson, and another SCO is that much harder to inflate.
And then I wake up; it was all a dream. Geeks aren't organised enough to pull it off. Or are they...
... the science.. in investment
I had the entertainment of doing some business in the dot.com boom and meeting a temporarily very famous City investment firm.
There is lots of accumulated experience, but it has far greater elements of chance and fashion than the physical sciences.
I think the SCO bubble is a fashion-driven one.
Bubble or not, SCO has delivered handsome returns. The important trick will be to dump shares before any poo hits the fan. Whoever has nerves of steel and acute judgement stands to win big time regardless of the eventual outcome. Does the rising share price reflect speculation that people think they can get off SCO before anyone else?
Also remember that IBM has an army of lawyers, and their business is *not* about cool technology, but making profits. I'm reasonably confident that had there been any suspicions, IBM would not be facing SCO down like it is, but negotiating a settlement that minimised risk for both parties.
But in response to the original article, we *should* be considering all possibiliies, and also remember that the suit is not being pursued out of spite, but a belief that it will deliver benefits. We really need to think from their perspective to see if we have forgotten anything.
The best way to secure something is to think like a thief.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Maybe something important we're forgetting isn't even involved with stock prices at all.
MS and Sun are pumping $$$ into SCO. If this goes on long enough and gets enough publicity, corporations will think twice about using Linux.
Has anyone ever thought about the possibility that a Caldera employee put offending code into the kernel source *intentionally* as part of a long-term business strategy to later sue Linux users?
Disclaimer: I'm no laywer...but probably neither are you.
Over the last twelve months the SCO stock price has climbed from just over a dollar to nearly eighteen dollars and at its peak it was well over twenty dollars. We all need to ask the same question about the SCO affair, what have we forgotten?
What you've forgotten is that SCO IPO'd 4 years ago at close to a hundred bucks. After the bubble burst it went to $1. So even if it HAS gone up 20x in the past year, it's stock is still 1/5 of what people thought it was worth a few years back.
There is a fool born every minute, and half the population is below average intelligence.
if it's been said already, too bad. microsoft is what is being forgotten. the capital to fight a litigation like this against the exbehemoth ibm needs gobs of cash. corporate laywers do not work on contingency. they like to be paid in advance. i'm sure there are a number of other smaller players as well, so, what's being forgotten? those who would benefit the most from such a strategic undertaking, which in itself may be only a diversion from something else.
"The stock price DOES reflect the value of a company in dollars. If I have something worth 10 cents, but I can find somebody to buy it for 10 dollars... My something is worth 10 dollars."
This is always a somewhat contentious statement. Without getting into the economic theory, one semantic distinction I've generally found heuristically useful is:
Value is what other people will pay; Worth is what you would pay.
So in this context, you're right. The stock price reflects what other people will pay you for it, are paying for it, value. It doesn't reflect worth, however. It's worth is what you can make out of it by holding on to it, what price you would sell it for, or what price you would pay to get it.
So when you say your something is worth ten dollars, well, no, it's not. That's it's value; i.e. what someone will pay you for it. If it's worth 10 cents to you, then you've just made a great deal, but it's still worth 10 cents.
When value equals or exceeds worth, then that's usually when a transaction occurs.
Let's say you're SCO, and you're looking for that fatal flaw in IBM's argument, but just can't find it. Why not get others to help? Post to /. and wait for the response. Many eyes....
SCO: Santa Cruz Operation
We forgot to that in the end a judge will decide.
We forgot that, judges are most of the time technologically uneducated, that it is only in the movie that truth and/or the honest people always win that OJ Simpson went free and that G. W. Bush kind of won the election thanks to some judges.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
You seem to forget that, after the stock is sold, any increase in its' value doesn't revert to the seller, but to the buyer.
No you're wrong. The only that the original poster was forgetting was that he's an inbred fucking idiot.
I'm happy that you shared your experience from a financial insitution standpoint but several of your statements make no legal sense. How many licenses have been tested? How many people doubt them? If the GPL were found to be unenforcable, how would that help SCO? If Linux were to be "outlawed" how would that help SCO (certainly wouldn't help their licensing program)? If SCO intentionally failed to disclose the nature of an infringement they might be found in contempt of court and would almost certainly face sanctions like cancelling discovery... and as far as recovering damages, they would forfeit that opportunity. So yes, many things could go wrong, but there are serious problems with each scenario you brought up.
Actually, the GPL is 100% reliable. The reason it has not been challenged in court is that it is so reliable that, until SCO, every violator has caved in before trial. SCO has not advanced one single argument against the GPL that could possibly hold water.
Go ahead, keep your faith in the infallible research that SCOX stockholders must be relying on. I'll believe it when I see it; all of SCO's actions up to this point indicate that they are completely out of their depth.
The conspiracy against OSS: They don't need to win to benefit, perhaps, and get rid of the unsightful little penguin contender.
Just need to keep the matter in litigation, delay it for 5 or so years, acting as a wart to keep confidence in Linux down and minimize competition against XP until the next major product, Windows Longhorn with the NGSCB can be released in 2006.
Then Microsoft can swoop in, buy out SCO, and pump a few million into litigation against Linux and OSS.
Get the TCPA/NGSCB standards implemented to prevent Linux from running on all standard hardware (leaving the result of the case irrelevent)
Then, for the final blow, launch a bunch of litigation against Open Source (Linux, Mozilla, and DotGnu) using a horde of patents on .NET
and browser plugin/activeX/OLE - related technologies, etc, etc.
Admittedly, this sounds like an argument that fails the money test (as in, it advises you not to follow the money because the money is somehow misleading). Yet, if I told you half a year before the S&L crisis that you shouldn't get involved with them, I'd have sounded just as crazy, because those guys were making money hand over fist.
Honestly, I don't think anything's necessarily forgotten here. We're talking about the modern financial system as a whole -- when a wave is coming along to topple something floating in the water, it bobs up and down tenuously first. This is a ripple, driven by insider trading (probably) and a bunch of lawyers desperate to boost stock prices before this whole thing goes belly-up.
Were this merely a logic thing, yeah, I'd be worried. Tools require logic. Judges want to be "consistent". Judges want to be convinced that they're doing the right thing, just like any other human being, for some definition of "the right thing". If a bunch of guys doing stuff for free, who have relatively airtight proof they haven't done anything wrong, can somehow be shown to be the "bad guys" compared to what is essentially a business who mismanaged themselves into the ground...well, then we've got a remarkably shitty lawyer.
And somehow I doubt we've got a shitty lawyer. Right Tool For The Right Job. :)
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You are what you think.
What has been forgotten is that you're no longer living in a Democratic Republic. You're now living in a oligarchy controlled by super-right wing neoconservatives and big oil, and fueled by scaring the living daylights out of the populace. The constitution has all but been thrown out.
:) ?
So... have you noticed some of the phrasing of SCO's letters? "the GPL is unconstitutional" (they use the constitution when it fits their needs), "have you shipped to Syria, Iran, North Korea" (read: any axis-of-evil countries)?
Within the next couple of months expect them to start making noises about Linux and OSS being a security threat. I certainly have noticed an undercurrent, a sub-text if you will, of this administration to gain more effective control of the Internet and OSS. What was up with the clandestine use of RFID tags at the Internet Summit?
Ask yourself, who is pulling Darl McBride's strings? Is it Bill? Is it Scott? Or is it, just maybe, Cheney? Kellogg, Brown & Root have been up to far more nefarious activities than this. It's a cakewalk for them.
I'll tell you a little secret. Oil is, and always has been the _top_ national security concern of the United States of America.
This little spaceship Earth of ours is rapidly heading for a major crisis. The United States consumes 20 billion barrels of oil a year. The world consumes 76 billion barrels (2001 numbers).
In 2001 only 8 billion barrels of new oil was discovered, and that was spread out over 300 relatively small and economicaly challenging fields.
Did you catch that? We burned 80 billion barrels of oil this year but discovered less than 10 billion. This has been going on for many years now. A few years ago the rule of thumb was we burned 4 barrels for every barrel discovered. Now it's 8:1. And China and India or only just getting started.
It's January 7th, and you're putting 4 logs a day on the fire, you look out the window and you see only 120 pieces of wood left in your wood pile. Oh well! We'll figure something out before March!
At any rate, the point is Bush and all is oil patch buddies are painfully aware of this little dilema and they know just what to about it. Secure the oil, and batten down the hatches on the populace.
Go to the online CIA factbook (google: cia factbook; i'm feeling lucky) and look up the country you live in, say Norway for example, scroll down to the "Economy" section and check out the "oil produced" and "oil consumed" figures. Interesting, eh? Norway is one of the few exceptions, a country that actually produces more oil than it consumes. In fact, Norway is the _only_ country that produces more than 10 times the amount of oil than it consumes. Anyway, that's not the point. Now click on the little graph icon next to "oil produced". Examine the top 20 oil producing countries. Ask yourself, which of these countries does the US control through one of these means: trade agreement, corruption, bullying, family ties
Which ones does the US not yet fully control? Now you know who's next on the hit list.
Do you think things are bad now? You ain't seen nothin' yet. How are you going to live when a barrel of oil costs $60? When a gallon of gas costs 4 bucks? 5 bucks? How about propane to heat your house at $3/gal? $4/gal? When the price of food doubles because of the fuel costs to run the farm equipment and our energy intensive food processing (i.e. how does Campbell's purify the water in your soup?)
And, as an aside, what the hell is up with #2 auto diesel costing more than premium gasoline in Silicon Valley?
As you can see, IMNSHO, it's all about oil and "security". Except it's a very twisted and mad concept of security. SCO is just another lever in the sub-game of clamping down on the Internet, just as is the RIAA, DMCA, etc. etc.
And it doesn't have to be this way. America has taken a very bad wrong turn, but it's not too late to correct (although the international wounds will take many years
What do they [SCO Investors] know that we don't?
1. There is always someone out there dumber than yourself.
2. With a lot of media exposure, a large pay out in the end and unknow odds, people are going to speculate. (The lottery is a bad deal, but it's hyped in all the local media so people take their chance.)
3. The people really going at it are the speculators. They are hoping for some more media attention to boost up the stock price just a bit more.
4. Last one out is a rotten egg!
Adam Blundell, Centerville, UT
Philip Busch, Chicago, IL
Mark Byland, Waitsfield, VT
Jeffery Candiloro, Strathfield, Australia
Michael Collins, Austin, TX
Adrian Dunston, Raleigh, NC
Bill Folsom, Stone Ridge, NY
Grant Henninger, Tustin, CA
Robert Hill, New York, NY
Brett Howard, Irvine, CA (or Mesa, AZ)
David Johnson, New Haven, CT
Mark Kistner, Warren, MI
Edmund Kump, Deer Park, NY (or Hauppauge, NY)
Scott Lockwood, Joliet, IL
Dave Mauldin, Seattle, WA
John McKeon, Warrensburg, MO
Franjo Sarcevic, St Thomas, Canada
Robert Sheehy, Oak Lawn, IL
Max Stalnaker, University Place, WA
Jan Sulmont, Poix de Picardie, France
Todd Varland, Burlingame, CA
Russell Warner, Jersey City, NJ
John Woodbury, San Francisco, CA
I'm confused. Who are these people? I don't recognize anyone except you.
Your help is appreciated.
2) The price of the stock doesn't determine the value of the company. Think dot-com, or any other over-priced stock.
3) The overall strangeness of the market shows why shorting a "bad" stock is usually much more dangerous than just buying a "good" stock. Sometimes, the market is stupid.
Such irE
We've forgotten that SCO damn-well better have a serious ace up it's sleeve to attempt a $3 Billion lawsuit against IBM and it's litigators at Cravath... that's not just like David challenging Golliath, it's like David walking up to Goliath, stabbing him in the foot...
The problem as I see it, is that the same stupid brokers that rised the price to ridiculous levels on foofoo companies during the dotcom bubble are also gaining money in speculating about this SCO affair.
Luckly, SCO is not GM or other big shot on the NYSE, so the market as a whole won't suffer when the artificially|ignorantly|maliciously inflated bubble finally bursts.
Why is revenue used as a metric? Why is revenue per share important? Companies can issue arbitrarily many shares so this metric is useless. Employees are only as good as their value to the bottom line.
Profit should be the metric. The whole reason to go into business in the first place is to make a profit.
I am reminded of that Saturday Night Live skit where you had a bank that would make change for you. You could give them a dollar and they'd give you back 4 quarters. How do they make profit? Volume...
I could setup a business that had billions in revenue and 0 profit.
Let's compare profit:
Microsoft: 13.10B
IBM: 12.93B
It's closer than you think - and Microsoft is still ahead. Microsoft is a cash machine. They accumulate money at a rate of about 1 billion a month. They can't re-invest it because what is a more profitable use than Microsoft's existing (and paid for) business?
They make so much money that they literally don't know what to do with it.
Perhaps this is why they are considered to be the largest technology company around.
I'm not trying to be nasty, but do I remember VA Linux's IPO in 1999: a 698% gain on the first day of public trading. At the time I thought, "How in the world can a company with just $10 million in revenue (with small earnings, lots of competition, and low barriers to entry), be worth $1 billion?" Time has shown ... some times markets are just irrational.
we were as well saying that Linux is very secure, since it is scrutinized by many eyes, etc etc... and then, two root exploits have appeared in the kernel in the last 2 months: so I am not so sure any more, regarding the outcome of this SCO case
It's not so much a matter of forgetting as it is a matter of denial. MS lost its case against the DoJ, supposedly the most powerful law enforcer in the US, but has yet to receive any effective punishment and is in fact behaving exactly as before as witnessed by its current crushing of Real Networks out of the market. The judges who were supposed to punish Microsoft proved technically incompetent and unable to understand the issues involved. MS is funding (via various underhanded means) SCO's bogus lawsuits against Linux via IBM and Red Hat, which by its own admission SCO plans to extend to attack the *BSD family of free operating systems. Given that the DoJ was unable to stop MS from abusing the law to its advantage and MS's huge cash reserves for funding endless legal antics (>$9 billion), it is probable that IBM and Red Hat will be unable to find judges capable of separating fact from fiction in SCO's case, or outlasting MS's appeals if they do. This means that SCO will be extorting money from a lot of companies and eventually end-users for some time to come, if not forever. Savvy investors who are not in denial of these facts will thus be investing in SCO and have already done so.
A curse be on any who mismoderate this post. It is on topic and does not contain profanity or insults and thus deserves to be readable by the majority.
That would be the same smart investors who got reamed in the dot com bubble burst, right? That stupid money has to go somewhere, and SCO have the best snake oil pitch in town.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"We've forgotten" THE POINT! Nice to see that so much drivel has gone into stock schemes and not recognizing the truth. The Open Source community has forgotten how to find a way to pay their mortgages by doing work that they give away for free while their day job gets shipped to India. Guess if they need a raise then they can just make the software so complex that any chance of implementing it will require a "consultant", until the next batch of college graduates needs to find a gig and undercuts their consulting prices and takes away their income stream. Did noone pay attention to basic free market economics? Glad that the Open Marxists are at the helm of the movement.
Is someone out there assuming that Microsoft still has some room to grow?
I wonder what the figures would be if market analysts saw Linux hitting Microsoft's server market?
There are 2 questions that nobody asks First: who's buying SCO's Stock and why ? Secund: Whom has the benefit of the FUD ? Let's be a little bit paranoid: It is possible that the SCO's Stock are bought by wellknown company like MS, Sun, IBM, just in the case of...It is possible that SCO are going to be bought by one of them, some people know that, they tell it to their friends, or it is only based on a rumor (very dangerous) so it could explain the rising of SCO's stock. For the linux competitors that case is very good just like an aid campaign, with much more impact on the decision maker. The Linux Competitor are not only MS but also Sun, which lost money, Linux is replacing more Unix Servers than MS Servers, any way, IBM because they have their own Unix (AIX) and they supply also Linux, more important, the community is behind him _even_ _if_ he losts (very important to have a good public opinion when you're selling something)...
A year ago, when scox was $1 a share, scox was a company that had never been profitable. Quite the opposite, scox had been gushing red ink since the day of it's bogus IPO. That IPO is still under investigation for fraud.
Furthermore, there was not any reason to think scox ever would be profitable. Scox's core product, UnixWare, was far inferior to Linux in performance and features, and far more expensive.
The only reason that scox ever had a profitable quarter was because of huge, one time, fud donations from msft and sunw. Even with those donations, scox had an unprofitable Q4.
Scox core business has decreased substantially since scox was $1.00. The scox phenominon was scam ochestrated by the insiders, for the insiders. If you want those sort of pofits, you have to be an insider, realistically there is no other way. So if you want want to increase your money 20X over in a few months in the stock market, start your own scam. There is really no other way.
People with a auto insurance sometimes drive less cautious (i.e. faster), because they know the insurance will pay in case of an accident. This may, depending on the person, increase the risk of an accident.
Who cares about Apple and SCO. If the real issue is IBM and microsoft, what we have on the one hand is an oak tree(IBM) grown from and acorn which has weathered lightning, wind and rain, It will grow slowly, but steadily and the loss of a brand does not kill the root. OTOH we have a bamboo(MS) Quick growing, high growing, but without the depth of root system to weather lightning wind and rain, and as it grows taller the more strain is put on the root until it falls over and collapses.
... one word
Why is this? well IBM sells "solutions" and for over 100 years this has worked. in the 80s they attempted to sell a product(OS/2 and the PC) and got hit hard for it. Now they sell solutions again and they have returned to their former glory. That mistake cost some branches and leaves but the trunk at root remain.
How is this difference manifest
support
IBM still supports every product they have made that can possibly be used. I can go to IBM.com and download drivers, diagnostics and bios upgrade tools for 20+ year old products. OTOH windows 98 is no longer supported.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
If you want to build wealth trading stock in public companies, history says the most successful strategy is to buy a wide, diverse portfolio.
As Don Lancaster pointed out more than two decades ago (in his now out-of-print classic, The Incredible Secret Money Machine), there are no more really good deals. And if it calls you on the phone, it isn't an investment... I still get at least one call a week from some 'broker' wanting to 'share' some news about a "great investment", to which I invariably reply that I would like to have him come and play a competitive game of software development against me for a living -- where I would do to him exactly what he would do to me in the stock market.
I'm of the opinion that the individual investor in the stock market is going to be fleeced more often than not, no matter what strategy s/he uses. I even joined an investment club to discuss various strategies and try some investment by consensus -- over the two years that we played our little game, we did fairly well; we only lost about a third of our money... I am convinced that the only way to invest is to first completely understand the business that you are investing in, and the information available to the typical small investor in the stock market is simply inadequate.
It appears to me that long-term wealth is most often the result of investing in tangible, productive assets and using them to their best advantage, while systematically reinvesting the proceeds back into the same thing. These days, I am approaching my retirement, so I'm more or less past that point (and I didn't really do all that well; sigh) -- so I'm trying to put as much money into indexed annuities as I can. I'm at the point where it is much more important to avoid large losses than it is to go for the large gains.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
Mark Byland
PO Box 1577
Waitsfield, VT 05673-1577
1-802-496-5068
mbyland@iocus.com
People are stupid. ... Home Shopping Network, International Star Registry, Pet Rocks, the list goes on forever.
I can't count how many things I could have invested in that I thought were immensely stupid and would not catch on. But people fall for them. Think about
The next time your thinking mind sees something stupid, think about what your non-techie friends (if any) might think of it.
Seriously though, IBM know how to produce good, reliable software. M$ never did, and never will. The only reason that M$ exist is that at one time IBM's management were so out of touch with reality that they did not realise how easy it would be for a smallish team of competent programmers to produce an OS for a microcomputer, so they went to someone who had zero competence and 100% unscrupulousness. Just look at the mess that has caused....
There are people betting that Darl isn't an idiot or a scam artist. They're buying stock on the chance that he gets a victory and the stock goes up so they can sell it at a higher price. This routinely happens, especially before any major decisive point, because no matter how one-sided an issue may seem, some people are going to think they know the real deal.
I used to work for a Telecommunications company. Several of my coworkers were buying stock in the company shortly before a quarterly release simply because the stock started going up. They figured it was going up because other people knew something. Almost exactly one month later the company filled for bankruptcy protection. My coworkers not only lost their jobs, they also lost a fair amount of money they had invested betting that someone else had insider information.
SCO stock will continue to rise until they are dealt a real defeat. So far they haven't lost anything important.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I can't remember (and wasn't told) all of the details, but it basically revolved around the fact that lotteries are random but statistically biased towards generation of paired numbers (ie. 10 and 11, or 23 and 24), or even a pair of paired numbers.
It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme, required capital to start, but he seemed quite able to maintain his margin.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Ha-Ha!
of course they are fools! ok - this is how the stock market works. at every large bank/investment house/etc, there is a somewhat small department. They are analysts, who follow stocks and companies. Specifically, each analyst only follows one industry. That's why the street likes Mcbride, because the very small group of people who actually make decisions concerning "tech" stops remember his lawsuit performance. They are not very "tech"ie, they simply are financial people who follow "tech" stocks.
The remainder of people outside of this small club are like sheep. They are rather useless, actually, all they do is follow the advice that their analysts, other company's analysts and what the television tells them. For the most part, they are the human element of the NYSE machine.
Of course, these sheep like people would object to that, because, frankly, many of them conduct independent research and can become very knowledgable about a given industry or company, but people with this knack are usually analysts.
These sheep are known as "traders" and they spend their days in those nifty Aero chairs constantly on the phone and in front of various market data displays. They are in charge of the bank's investments, and perhaps their funds.
Again, they are a crude & rude. They are abusive and tend to have short life spans. This is accomplished through very long workdays, high pressure work environment and a taste for the finer things in life, like cocaine.
In the next 20-30 years, these loud idiots will surely be replaced, hopefully by computers, and technicians who make sure the computers are working properly.
The closest thing to a stock market trader/broker is a used car salesmen. The only difference is, successful traders earn 100's of thousands in bonus, and the succesful broker 10's of thousands in bonus, therefore the stock person will be better dressed, and that more boorish.