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.
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...
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
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
to short 1000 shares of SCOX...Thanks for the reminder!
WTF? Over?
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?
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.
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.
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
Are we sure this story isn't an SCO plant to spread FUD?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
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?
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.
To pay your $699 licensing fees!
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
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".
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^]
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
...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
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)?
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.
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"
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.
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.
The article is predicated on the assumption that the stock price means something about the fundementals of the company. I'd say a comment on the realities of speculative investing is on-topic.
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-
"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!
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.
My opinion: If that's the case, the author is an idiot. This whole situation shows the signs of a textbook pump-and-dump manuever. The fact that Linux was chosen as a bogus legal target is fairly irrelevant other than the fact that MS may have been involved with encouraging that decision. IBM is far larger and more powerful than both SCO and Microsoft put together. If they thought they stood a chance of losing, they would have just bought SCO outright.
My prediction: In the end, this whole thing will backfire on the evil men who started this mess. Linux will be championed not only as a victor, but as an unstoppable force. SCO will wither and die for lack of a workable business model. MS will continue to lose the PR war against OSS.
Sidenote: It is not ethical to invest in an unethical company just because their sleazy tactics are causing a temporary stock rise.
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!
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.
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
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)
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.
>> IBM is far larger and more powerful than both SCO and Microsoft put together
Actually according to todays Wall Street Journal, Microsoft's market capitalization is $296,802 million, IBM's is $157,504 million, and SCO Group's is $235 million, so, infact Microsoft is quite a bit larger than IBM and SCO combined.
But the fact remains that IBM could probably have bought SCO if they wanted to.
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
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.
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.
...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.
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 will not backfire on the evil men who started this mess, it will backfire on the idiots who have their (or their clients') money 'invested' in that company when the music stops.
I invest in shares on a fairly minor basis and was so appalled by the boom of the late 90's (Warren Buffett: 'how are these companies ever going to make money?') that I got out altogether for a while. I missed some massive profits - as we probably all have here - but totally missed the subsequent crash as well. I finally started coming back in at the end of 2001.
The problem back then was that shares were vastly overvalued but kept on rising because they were rising. The charts looked great and pension-funds managers who pulled their funds out of these overvalued stocks were sacked shortly afterwards because their funds were underperforming.
Then came the crash and we all got burnt. That is even forgetting companies like Enron or Worldcom.
It even looks to me as though SCO have learnt from those two companies. They are filing their correct figures and their broken business-plan with the SEC. No fraud there. People who invest there will deserve all they get, the only question is the timescale.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
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.
You have got to be kidding me.. Look how high the price of stock in .com buisnesses a few years ago.. how long did they last? or how about worldcom's stock? or Enron's?
Investors have a tendancy to fall for hype.
What have we forgotten? How about the fact that SCO releasing EVERYTHING they say on prnewswire where the investors get to see them.
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
"The time is always now" - Victor
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
(sigh--kiss my karma goodbye, but...)
Absolutely wrong. You obviously don't deal with arbitrage specialists, short-sellers, contrarians, professional bears and the like. They seem to do pretty well financially.
The fascination with the market as a wealth-generating device arises from, among many many other factors, the ability to make money ("win") using a variety of different techniques. Consistently successful investors rely on a mix of investment strategies, some involving buy-n-hold of a variety of different classes of securities, other strategies involving more volatile involvement.
Your statement has a high degree of "warm fuzziness", but is not supported by the whole of investment behavior.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?