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SCO Seeks Licenses Down Under
WildCode writes "SCO is now targeting Aussies in its continuing Linux licence saga. According to the story, one Aussie organization has already signed up for the licence. The ACCC has no comment at this time but this certainly puts a twist on things as the ACCC were waiting for the results of the lawsuits in the U.S. before making any judgement. Personally I think its time for the ACCC to say to SCO 'wait for the U.S outcomes before taking action here.'" An anonymous reader points to another story at internetnews.com.
The good is that we have the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
If SCO calls you, give them the finger and then report them to the ACCC. The Perth company, CyberKnights, lodged a complaint earlier on this month.
If SCO keeps going with trying to get UNIX licenses in Australia they should be prepared to face the ACCC.
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*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
The previous chair of the ACCC (Allan Fells) wasn't popular with business, which in my view, meant that he must have been doing something right. The current chair (Graeme Samuel) doesn't seem to be so so proactive (or controversial), so they may adopt a wait and see approach. In any case, I am wondering if what the SCO group are attempting to do could best be covered by Fair Trading laws which, in Australia, are administered by the State governments. I guess the anti-competition aspect of SCO's behaviour could give the ACCC jurisdiction.
And prepared to face us.
Give Kieran (SCO AUS CEO) a call or email and let him know what you think (politely)
His voicemail is answering at the moment - 'I am away from my desk' but he will listen to your message as soon he gets back'
Haven't tried his mobile yet....
Kieran O'Shaughnessy
Regional General Manager ANZ
The SCO Group
Level 11, 56 Berry Street
North Sydney NSW 2060
Australia
Tel +61 2 9440 7577
Fax +61 2 9440 7588
Mob 0419 66 00 16
email kierano at sco.com
web www.sco.com
Simple - because they are being payed. You have to get money from somewhere to pay the food for the kids and the mortgage.
Personally, I would not get my hands dirty with such a job, but many people have landed in it and carry its stigma now so they cannot find another one in the industry even if they want.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Luckily, we have s202 of the Copyright Act which says that it's illegal in Australia to make groundless threats of legal proceedings. That is, you cannot say "buy a licence or I'll sue you" unless you are really in a position to sue and win. We also have a "loser pays winner's costs" rule in litigation, which means that once you've started to sue, you cannot discontinue without being ordered to pay the other side's costs.
Here is a one year version. It currently shows that SCOX rose pretty steadily relative to IBM until last September, and then it oscillated a bunch until January, when it started down. In this view, SCOX still hasn't gone below the relative position it was at last year.
Of course, there's also the short term absolute status, which currently shows SCOX under $8 and falling. I believe that's already below the critical panic level for Darl. Don't they have to put up some real money now?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Yeah, but business monkeys (finally) caught up with the techies. I think the curtains have fallen (at last). It's just a matter of time before they reach their 2$ level again (just my 2 cents). More important, every time they announce a new lawsuit, the stock drops even more, instead of rising as in the previous months. They even have to buy their own stock back, a well known mechanism to superficially elevate stock value. Meanwhile, I still think that the top of sco earned a lot of money with their maneuvres. I'm no stock wizard, but I know you can even make money on a falling stock...
According to this article in the Salt Lake Tribune, it needs to stay below 6.75 for 20 consecutive days. A little over a dollar to go. Buyback could be used to try to make a bounce, but I would hope that the threat of 6.75 would cause the stock to dip enough in anticipation once it is in the neighborhood and so the buyback is just throwing away more money.
SCO are simply forum shopping. When they get a bite then Darl cracks a fat saying how some Aussie wuss fell for it.
You gotta call SCO's bluff mates. They have never asked anyone to remove any SCO code from the Linux source tree because it just isn't there.
ps: My first car was a Holden (Just Hold'in Together) Premier V8 so please forgive me !.
IANAL, but I think the difference is that the German legal system has mechanisms in place to do what they did, whereas the US legal system doesn't. How AU compares, I don't know.
This is the whole point. It hasn't been proven that they own any IP in Linux. Novell have stated that SCO didn't even aquire ownership of what they claim to own. A respectable company would prove such things before pursuing users. Respectable, SCO is not.
With some 30+% of their stock sitting on the table waiting for the roulette ball to fall, I can't see how anyone could consider this SCOX as a safe investment. Its appears that its owners are 46% insiders, 40% institutions and the rest is small investors playing games hopeing for the high margin options to go their way. When the equivalent of 15% of the share holders are betting on you going broke in the next few months, its not a good sign. It appears that options on SCO are something like 75 times more popular than options on Ford or MSFT.
Well, they're getting close. They're threatening legal action against Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for using Linux. LLNL is a customer of Linux Networx, part of the Canopy Group.