SCO - What have WE Forgotten?

Ed Almos asks: "When trying to examine 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?"

"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."

Comments

SCO

[Stargoat]

If any organization got as much press as the SCO, regardless of whether they did anything or not, they're stock would rise in value.

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.

Re:SCO

[diersing]

The difference being Enron was in the press after the place was a blaze and smelling of gasoline. Other then a baseball field in Houston, the masses knew very little about them prior to see suits in handcuffs and giant paper shredders on the evening news.

SCO is a catch phrase outside of tech circles. I literally had to tackle my mother to prevent her from investing. She argued about them being in the press and once the lawsuit was settled the advice she was getting was they'd triple in value. After shedding some light on the grounds of the lawsuit and how I felt about the facts of the case she understood why I freaked out. But then again, just because thats how I feel doesn't mean the judge/jury won't find in their behalf.

I'm not claiming to have any more information then any other casual observer to all this, but to answer the question of why is the stock price rising?, in my mother's case, its because some dumbass calling himself a stock trader said there was a buzz and is forcasting the stock going through the roof after they win some lawsuit they're part of.

Skeletons in the closet

[mark99]

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...

Invalid Assumption

[kaffiene]

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.

Re:Invalid Assumption

[thales]

"Investors aren't often all that smart and a bit of media buzz is often enough to make them invest."

Investors don't buy stock in companies like SCO. Speculators do. SCO stock isn't an investment, it's a wager.

POV

[GnrlFajita]

Point of view - that is primary thing most people forget when looking at things like that jump in share price. If you are working as a stockbroker, or even just an average joe that dabbles in the market, and you see this tech company (that has been around a while) claiming billions of dollars worth of licensing fees for its intellectual property, don't you think it'd be worth throwing a few dollars at them just in case they're right? Especially considering the magic words: 'intellectual property,' 'licensing fees,' and 'tech.'

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.

A key thing to remember:

[odano]

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.

Lottery Ticket

[Raindance]

First off, wonderful submission. It's well-written, well-meaning, and helpful.

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-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.

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

Corrections

[overshoot]

SCO have been ordered to produce their evidence against IBM by midnight on January 11th, 2004.

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.

The core of the lawsuit

[Zathrus]

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.

Re:This is nothing new

[tarquin_fim_bim]

The question is; do you want to feel good about yourself or worship at the alter of Mammon. If the soul purpose of ones life is to die with as much money as possible then perhaps one may regret not buying SCO stock. But consider all the honest companies that may be lacking investment due to this anomaly.

Re:This is nothing new

[FireBird615]

I think what the author was trying to say is "What do they [SCO Investors] know that we don't?". I agree that the case SCO is making is rediculous, and frankly, I think they'll lose. The question, though, is there something that they could/would/can pull in court, that would make them money? As we all know, just because everyone knows your wrong, doesn't mean the court will agree with you.

Think Pump and Squeeze

[dmaxwell]

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.

You miss the point.

[AltGrendel]

Are all our ducks in a row?

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.

Re:This is nothing new

[Tackhead]

> The question is; do you want to feel good about yourself or worship at the alter of Mammon. If the soul purpose of ones life is to die with as much money as possible then perhaps one may regret not buying SCO stock. But consider all the honest companies that may be lacking investment due to this anomaly.

(You don't have make it your sole purpose in life, but could you at least sacrifice a rubber chicken upon the altar of literacy?)

Spelling flame aside, I pay frequent homage and occasional tribute to Mammon. He's a lesser god, but his temple is always a hive of excitement. And it's from that perspective that I'm speaking.

I don't regret not buying SCO. The investment premise is that there's a one-in-ten chance that they'll be able to slip this scam past a judge, and sock IBM to the tune of ONE... BILLION... DOLLARS. (Or that IBM will simply buy the entire company for $500M to prevent the scam from working.)

That's it. If you buy SCOX, you're buying a lottery ticket. A hedge against fraud and stupidity, as it were -- if these dirtballs manage to make their scam work, it's the end of Linux and a very bad omen for the rest of the technology industry. If you're heavily invested in RHAT and NOVL, for instance, you might want to own some SCOX on the off chance that the judge falls for the scam and lets Darl wipe Linux off the face of the earth.

Had SCOX been optionable, I'd have bought put options, several months ago, and every one of those options would have expired worthless, because the scam has lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. But of course, going net short SCOX is just as much a speculation on a judge's ruling as going long SCOX.

The reason I didn't buy or attempt to short SCOX has nothing to do with a hedge against stupidity or speculating that the scam will eventually be unwound and Darl will finally get his much-deserved perp walk.

It's because I don't play the lottery. Either way. There are good and bad companies out there that are undervalued. Buy those. There are good and crappy companies out there that are wildly overvalued. Don't buy those.

SCOX is a crappy company for which there's no way to know whether it's undervalued or overvalued. The risk of going long or short do not justify the rewards.

My position on the behavior of The SCO Group is that they're a bunch of lying fuckweasels who deserve nothing less than a forcible sodomization with a diamond-grit-encrusted Louisville Slugger wielded by SEC Chairman Bill Donaldson himself. But so long as the stock's valuation is dependent upon the presence or absence of Clue Receptors in the neural pathways of a single human being, I have (and will take) no position in SCOX stock.

Expected value

[Gzip Christ]

OK, let's calculate out the odds that the market is giving SCO then... The $3 billion from IBM would be a one time deal, and so would just go towards SCO's book value and not their recurring revenue, so let's ignore the $3B for a moment. Stocks are trading at around a price to earnings ratio of 20 now, so multiply SCO's current market cap by 20 and we should get the expected value of SCO's earnings. Their present market cap is $251M which means their expected yearly earnings would be $12.5M. At $699 per license, that means they are expected to sell 18,000 licenses per year. The Linux Counter websites estimates that there are 18 million Linux users. Let's say for simplicity that each Linux user purchases a new computer and needs a new SCO license every 5 years. That would result in 3.6 million licenses needed per year. So the market is giving SCO a probability of 0.005 of capturing the Linux market as it claims it will do.

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.

Re:This is nothing new

[AbyssLeaper]

As someone who has worked in the investment industry for almost 6 years, I have to agree with Koreth on this. A rise in stock price means absolutely nothing. The line traders no little or nothing about Linux, SCO or the dispute. They know what they read in the papers, what the read from Bloomberg, and what analysts say.

Recent news tells us that all of these people can and are wrong sometimes. The fines imposed on the likes of Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan should tell use wonders.

Personally, I'm waiting to see if SCO can produce anything substantial in court, which is where they will live and die with this. Here's my prediction: If SCO cannot produce any substantial evidence to their claims, the price will drop to the sub-$.25 level faster than Bill Clinton's trousers with an intern. ;-)

Dream Mine

[yintercept]

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.

Re:Dream Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

It's a sucker's bubble. Basically, what the anti-SCO press is missing can be found at GrokLaw.

You have to understand something very simple:

1. There are very few people in SCO's pool of stock compared to other small cap investments.

2. A majority of that stock is held by institutions and these institutions are known for quasi-legal and illegal practices - just like Canopy.

3. Because of 1 & 2, the ability to control the price of the stock is greatly enhanced, and so long as Baystar, RBC, Renaissance Capital and others feel the need keep the price up, no amount of shorts will affect it for very long. There will not be enough shares out there to make it happen - they've seen to that.

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.

Well, you are half-way correct about the Dream Mine, but we'll save that for another conversation because the topic itself leads people to think you've lost your marbles using this as an example.

Utah Valley Mormons have got to be some of the most gullible people I have ever met. Faith has nothing to do with it. It's the wide-eyed ignorant bliss that comes from ignoring the rest of the world in the hopes that it will go away.

This leaves sharks like McBride (who was a putz back at BYU when I was there) to prey on the "innocent" using the Church and the Utah culture as a backdrop to Rape, Pillage, and Burn his way through everyone's money. In Wall Street circles, that's know as Standard Operating Procedure. And for that you get bonuses, accolades and a chance to do it again.

I think the word you are looking for here is Gaddianton.

Right on--SCO is speculation

[WebCowboy]

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.

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 .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

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.

Re:It's not what WE missed...

[greenrd]

I work for an investment bank and IB analysts pull information from EVERY source.

That may or may not be so. Analysts also sometimes lie, as the New York Attorney General recently demonstrated in a successful court case. I won't speculate on whether it's more of a case of ignorance, lying, or a cynical evaluation of the ignorance of the market on the part of certain investors, that has been driving up the price in this case.

SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.

Let's apply Occam's Razor here: I move that they are getting lots of attention because (a) they are sqwarking a lot; (b) they are scaring some Fortune 500 companies, at least temporarily until the CxOs talk to their legal advisors; (c) there is a lot of money and a catastophic harm to the Linux market puportedly at stake here, if you believe SCO.

Attention does not imply correctness. Popularity does not imply correctness.

The GPL has never been tested in court, I haven't seen anything indicating that this is 100% reliable.

Well, admittedly there is a flaky argument prevalent on Slashdot and Groklaw. The arguments runs that if the GPL were "invalidated" it would revert to "no rights to copy", which would kill SCO in punitive damages. Not necessarily. Another possibility is that the court might try to find the "nearest charitable purpose" that is similar to the spirit of the GPL but doesn't break the law.

So that counter-argument doesn't really work. But the problem with your argument is more fundamental. In order to talk about this sensibly we have to speculate on what precisely the judge might try to strike down. No-one, to my knowledge, has put forward a good argument for why any law or constitutional amendment would invalidate any aspect of the GPL - least of all SCO.

Granted, the least popular aspect of the GPL is the copyleft idea. But it is a completely logical fallacy to argue that because it is unpopular with some, then it is somehow legally dubious. Yes, it is perhaps the most likely aspect for SCO to attack. But without a visible chink in the armour, why should we worry?

I think the onus is on you to suggest an actual argument for why the GPL might fail in court.

There are good reasons why they wouldn't release this code. If they did, the Linux community would make sure that the offending code wasn't in the next kernal release (which would probably be all of a week in coming) and then SCO could only go after users for past use of their code. That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out. That's much more enforcable as well.

Note that SCO (both predecessors in interest, old SCO and Caldera) has contributed to Linux massively, and even sold it, and continued to offer it for months after evidence of infringement was allegedly discovered. So what we have here is a company spending years giving out its own product for free and misleadingly giving the impression - in a very clear license, the GPL! - that the product being given out is unencumbered in all relevant respects. Even if SCO could persuade a judge that the infringements were not noticed due to gross incompetence on SCO's part, any reasonable judge would give all parties a reasonable grace period to wait for the patch to come out and apply it.

And the law (and IBM's contract with SCO, incidentally) obliges SCO to reveal what code is infringing before it can claim damages. Damages incurred by users prior to that time are innocent infringements, and although they may be technically liable, would any judge in the land award SCO money based on its own failure to mitigate the alleged damages? No, it would not. There is no successful precedent that I have heard of for such abusive rent-seeking towards innocent third-

Have we been trolled?

[einhverfr]

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.