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.

Comments

Unlikely that Europeans will buy into this scam

[dexterpexter]

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!

Re:Unlikely that Europeans will buy into this scam

[Saven Marek]

Europe is a completely different story to the US when it comes to how they'll handle companies talking crap. So far it's just the UK and Italy, but if they try to push any further they'll run into problems.

Like Germany, there is a lot more restriction in many parts of europe of what is allowed to be said. "Free Speech" may not exist as a constitutionally bound concept in many parts of europe, if you don't have the responsibility to back it up. SCO simply don't have that.

Along with the general anti-american attitude of much of europe I see it far more likely a country will tell SCO to piss right off until they have solid proof, putting the burden on SCO to play their hand and get the legal wrangling out of the way before they can play the media with their lies, half truths and misinformation

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If they were serious they would have already...

[Jerry]

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.

Europe just ignores that shit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ugh stop this cliche

[egg troll]

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.

Re:Ugh stop this cliche

[Asic Eng]

Well fact is that the French put their own country on the line, at a time at which the German army was perceived to be vastly superior. (And allied with Russia, too.) They did not have the option to retreat across the channel and they did not come in after Germany's army had already been defeated in Russia. They knew that no matter whether there'd be victory or defeat - the war would be fought on their own territory, in their own cities.

Yes many people in France (and in Britain, and in the US and ...) were sympathetical to the Nazis. They French and British units fighting in France were quickly defeated by the Germans, that is true also. However that happened to the armies of many other countries in Europe - Poland, Greece, Norway etc etc etc. The German army was vastly superior at the time.

It's time to face reality here: accusing the French of being cowards is not something based on valid historical assessments but pure chauvinism. And anybody who thinks a joke is still funny after being constantly retold for more than 50 years is only excused if he has a brain tumor.

Is this stock typical?

[strider3700]

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?

Re:The real news here...

[MuParadigm]

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.