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SCO Wants to License Europe
MacEnvy writes "It looks like SCO isn't letting up - they've decided to expand their war on Linux to other countries. According to Internet Week, the company will be offering its Intellectual Property License in the UK and other European countries starting February 1. Whether Europeans will buy the licenses has yet to be seen." Motley Fool has chipped in on SCO's chances.
The U.S.-based SCO has yet to successfully get Americans to buy into their licensing scam. I do not see why any European countries would either.
I suspect that SCO will be mocked and laughed at by the Europeans just the same as we Americans do. Finally! A humor that transcends boundaries!
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
filed lawsuites here in the USA, and we would be reading stories about the suite and the defendents.... but they aren't serious, they haven't filed any suites against linux users here. They are pumping and dumping their stock, and Darrell's scrapbook of news stories... again.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
After January 23, I expect they'll have a bit tougher time getting anybody to buy their "license".
I come from Europe, been in most Western-European countries and I think that Europe as a whole is not so much 'tainted' with patent-protection. Good thing. European companies will probably use SCO's letters as toilet paper, or piss on it.
As a last resort there is the totally undemocratic but ever-so power-gaining European Commision which just declared open-source The Way To Go. What they'll probably do is (1) look at SCO's web site (2) see how mean looking that CEO is and (3) revert SCO letters to the trash bin. Also remember that the EU commision is quite happy to hand out 'fines' of hundreds of millions of dollars to whatever company that makes them cross. Yes.. sometimes semi-dictatorship is advantageous.
The French fought valiently in WW2. Unfortunately the Germans were a vastly superior military and quickly overwhelmed the French army. However the French didn't simply give in, despite a puppet gov't being installed. Instead they continued to fight back as the French Resistance. Many brave Frenchmen (and women) died battling the Nazi's who'd taken over their country.
This cliche is false, and its been beaten to death. Let's put it to rest.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
What I think will happen, even though many people disagree, is that SCO and IBM will settle. This will further propagate the FUD that keeps down the smaller Linux operators and gives both SCO and IBM what they want: a chance to come out clean and free of any IP issues.
We need to put just as much pressure on IBM to take this case all the way through. I won't be surprised if it gets settled. IBM settling would do more for IBM than winning the case, which would legitimize all of IBM's competition in the Linux marketplace.
Ok I've been following along with this story for quite awhile now and I personally believe sco is going to lose the case. It should be the end of the company at that time. Now I was just at the nasdaq site looking to see how the recent news has affected sco. While there I started looking into some of it's numbers and found that overall if I knew nothing about the company everything looks pretty good. Hell they even went from losing money to having an actual earnings/share in the past year. There stock is ranked as being an average risk and there is both a buy rating and a sell rating in the analysis. Something worth $250,000,000 could be worth $2 in less then 30 days time and it's an average risk?
This leaves me wondering just how many other stocks out there are rated so highly based off of a hope and prayer? Is the entire system this easily manipulated?
"The OSDL's roster includes: Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Nokia, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), Toshiba, and others."
It's no coincidence all these companies make most of their money selling hardware. They benefit because they can sell a product cheaper, and thus gain an edge on competition. All they need to do is donate enough to keep OSDL going. These companies are reaping huge profits at the expense of programmers who work on Linux, who may draw a salary for their work, but no profit sharing. Oh well, Linus and company chose their own poison.
or anywhere else.
Selling a license to a technology that you do not own is serious fraud - prison time. Scox doesn't own linux.
Scox just wants "investors" to think that scox has some possible new sources on revenue.
A few people from the UK have already tried to buy licenses, scox wont sell them. Scox won't sell those licenses in the USA either. Call scox up and ask.
It's called "risk management". Because the PIPE shares are "preferred", they don't pay dividends in cash, and because they are "convertible" the amount of money SCO owes Bay Star and RBC goes *up* if the stock goes up, thus it's marked as a loss to SCO, and vice versa if the stock goes down.
The principal behind the derivative is not that unusual. What is unusual is for a company to structure such a derivative as to impact so heavily on its books depending on its *own* stock movement.
The other unusual aspect of it is that it flies in the face of the common sense aspect of rewarding a CEO for upward stock movement. Darl McBride receives about 600,000 thousand stock options upon achieving 4 consecutive profitable quarters. He's already guaranteed 150,000 of those options for the first profitable quarter he achieved.
Now, if SCO can show a profit on it's books by taking actions that lower the value of the stock, Darl could be more motivated to let the stock price slide rather than take action to prop it up. So this deal puts the CEO's best interests in potential conflict with the investors. Which is just another reason no one should be invvesting in SCO stock and why it is *way* over-valued at present.
If they do this, Darl makes 600,000 * thousand * ($11 or so - what the options cost Darl). Holy sheep! That company's stock should be red-flagged and teams of SEC strike auditors standing by.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The combined air forces of the British and French was much larger than the Luftwaffe.
The Germans understood modern mechanized warfare: the massing of coordinated, combined-arms forces. The French assigned their tanks piecemeal to various foot-borne infantry units.
The French also folded. Period. In 1940, the Germans took just twice as long to beat the French than the US took to defeat a decade-of-sanctions-starved Iraq in 2003.
The Germans didn't spend the 1920s teaching their children that "violence doesn't settle anything." Anyone who believes that "violence doesn't settle anything" needs to move to a planet with a blue sky and a dominant race that, when it comes right down to it, is pretty damn violent.
The French foreswore violence pretty much after World War I, despite the fact their next-door neighbor didn't.
But if they start selling licenses without being able to proof anything of their claims, then it could be that in several european countries they will get
the countries police and on their back, for fraud and blackmail.
European law is very strict in this regard, as you can see with the cease and desist Sco already has gotten in germany.
Over here if you sell something you have to clearly proof that you sell more than thin air, and I doubt Sco is legally allowed to sell some of their licenses over here unless they are able to proof their claims, which the remaining two weeks are a little bit thin timeframe for.
Well, see SCO is only successful in the US with their FUD. In Germany they are forbidden to their FUD under law. This whole issue is brought up in the corrupt US law and media system only.
Also France did not invade Iraq. They did not fought two deadly wars against a much smaller populaion of 20 millions. They did not made 150000 bombing raids during 12 years of sanctions. They did not saw aside when ten thousands of Iraqi childs, woman and man died due they had no food or medication. All this was only for the reason that the big fat US Forces of a people of 250 million could maybe fight down a 20 million people for a dumb ass in chief and Haliburton...and is still unable.
You moron - don't blame my french brothers in arms. Be aware!
Greetings from Old Europe/Germany
Didn't they teach you in French revisionist history that Napoleon was not French? He was Sicilian. And France is the only country I know of to be defeated by an invading diplomat. (Again, Napoleon.)
Honestly not a troll just an observation. Looking at it from this side of the pond (uk) and looking at the way business is conducted (or at least reported) you would think that this was Nigeria we are talking about and not the US! We see things like SCO (pondlife?-sorry pun) trying to come over here, the latest accounting scandal (todays is: worlds largest recruitment firm reports accounting irregularities in it's American operation) together with reports of the Bush administration feathering it's nest over Iraq etc and it seems like the actions of a tin pot dictatorship and not that of a modern democracy Sorry to be negative, the US is a great country I've been there several times and always been made welcome (probably won't be allowed in now, after posting this! ---tinfoil hat time)
In another post:
1. It could be Microsoft. I don't think Bill G and Darl actually planned the whole thing myself, but some people have mentioned it, so let's grant the possibility. If so, MS isn't up to a lot, they tried something, it is in the process of failure, they don't have a way to turn that around, so they are either regrouping or starting something else unrelated. IF MS has an evil plan, I hope they have enough sense to pick somebody totally unconnected to SCO for the next attempt, cause anything less is unworthy.
I have a friend who works at Microsoft. I took him to lunch the other day and mentioned this SCO/Microsoft connection. First I asked if he was even aware of what was going on. "Oh, yes." he said. Then I went as far as to suggest That Microsoft was the ghost partner in all this. He responded with "Well that's what everybody in this office thinks." Then he just looked at me, intently, as if to say... I waiting... read deeper. I've given you an insiders answer but can't say any more.
All I could do is say "Wow, okay..."
No proof of high level talks; no smoking gun. But I knew then that SCO smelled Microsoft money and fell for it as so many other companies have. How many countless companies have smelled M$ money, gone for it, only to find it cost them their life. Not unlike selling out to the Devil for short term gains. Microsoft wins. Not only through SCO can they attack Linux, they sink the preceved owners of UNIX in the process. This is *so* Microsofts style. With Darly not being too bright, kind of like a president I know, the job to sucker him in wasn't too tough I suspect.
Then again, they could in fact be men of vision that appreciate that all of their OS-development is done for free by various people around the world...
50 more years of anti-American jokes? Ghod, say it ain't so...
Anti-American jokes aren't anywhere near as offensive. It's not like the Americans are likely to understand them anyway.