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NRF Calls SCO's Claims 'Meritless'
Xenographic writes "The National Retail Federation has just put out a press release in which their CIO concludes that SCO's IP claims are "meritless," and that Novell is the last company which can show a clear title to the code in question. That SCO's claims are meritless is hardly news to anyone who has been following this, but what is interesting is that the NRF was prompted to release this because of legal threats to their membership, specifically SCO's threats to sue "major retailers." So the businesses being menaced by SCO are banding together, making it that much less likely that SCO will be able to generate easy money from mere threats of litigation. SCO's stock, meanwhile, appears to have taken a small dive from this news. Also, you can find further details and analysis on Groklaw."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
SCO's stock, meanwhile, appears to have taken a small dive from this news.
That's strange, because it says the stock is up.
Change: 0.11 (1.79%)
Wouldn't it be funny if when it's found that Novell indeed unquestionably owns the rights to the code, they turn around and pull a SCO on us?
hehe he
he
he?
gulp.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
What code would this be, exactly?
This is good news. As a few J. Random's of the internet, we don't stand much of a chance. Large companies like these do stand a chance, and a quite good chance if they team up, like they should.
I wonder how Darl McBride is feeling right now.
--- I hate my sig.
It's still nice to see a large non-tech organization come out and say, "Hey, this is crap."
Now if the courts will do it and slap them with a $699 fine for every false claim they've ever made, I'll die a happy puppy.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I don't get these guys. How soulless do you have to be to outright lie about what you own, when you bought it, and the terms of an otherwise perfectly clear license?
Ooops, now SCO will sue me, too.
P.S. If you thought GPL was "viral," listen to SCO sometime: anyone who has ever seen the SysV source code can never work on an OS again, because that makes it a "non-literal derivative." Jeez.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
... for SCOFud in the Business marketplace. It will be interesting to see how the ProSCO spinmeisters will work around this one.
Sure, they can talk about how this is just one organization, but it is a very large business organization, and I really don't think that they can convince the various investment managers that the National Retail Federation is in the practice of calling suits 'meritless' if it's not really clear that the suit is, in fact, meritless on its face.
Bye Bye, SCO
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
Ok how many people have to tell SCO to shove it before a judge does? Lemme see:
National Retail Federation
IBM
Linus
Autozone
There are more I am sure, but I mean come on. Noone agrees with SCO (at least I have not heard of anyone). When is a judge just going to toss this crap out of court?
Gorkman
Thinks they're worth a penny a share
(look at the bottom of the 'bid orders' section)
No, this should not have gotten modded "offtopic".
It expresses a sentiment I think most of us feel. SCO. Meritless. Litigious Bastards.
We... Don't... Care... Anymore!
When an actual court gives Darl a backhand, then we can all chat about how we knew it would happen all along. But updates on every stupid little "Group X says this" or "SCO added another company to their suits" really stopped impressing most of us months ago.
Please, people, stop submitting this crap to Slashdot. Go make a blog site dedicated to every little gossipy detail of SCO's legal activities if you want, but, well, read the tagline - "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". SCO neither counts as news, nor do they matter.
So, who's the National Retail Foundation and why does their opinion matter?
Just curious.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
... do you like toilet paper?
Don't say it's so!
If SCO doesn't have any more real claims in court, how will we as a society get by?
The last time a major company fell apart, we had to hire Sally Struthers to start up "CEO charity foundations".
We can't have these people walking the streets. Keeping them in upper management positions is the only way to protect the rest of us from serious harm. At least in the boardroom, secluded from the rest of society, they can do the least damage.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
(from their Mission Statement)
Yikes. One in five American workers and $3.8 trillion in Sales can't be wrong!
Or can they?
No.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Almost as if?!? I realize that lawyers include modifiers like that to lessen the chance of successfully actionable lawsuits, but come on. SCO is suing former clients, it's going through money like it's still dot.com days. For the corporation, the ONLY revenue stream is through litigation.
Of course, for the principals, the primary revenue stream is through stock manipulation, shifting assets between Canopy elements and taking everything not explicitly nailed down. But that's personal, not business.
Oh, you mean GrokLaw?
In related news the SCO group lays off 275 to "re-allign" their organization.
With a market cap of around 90 million now, this one has been a real dog for the investors. And this is a company with $65 million in cash in the bank, supposedly - that means the price-to-book ratio is getting mighty low. And their P/E is pushing down towards 20.
For those not familiar with this stuff, that means the premium people were putting on this stock reflecting the possibility of a big (i.e. 5 billion dollar) win against IBM has basically dropped to near-zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole executive team get rotated out soon or something else drastic happen to SCO. The legal battle may drag out for ages, but the market has spoken.
Why isn't it zero? I don't get it.
Even if they go bankrupt, the stock will still trade for a while at a very low price like $0.00001/share. I had stock in a company that went bankrupt two years ago. At the end of last year, I sold it so I could take the loss on my taxes. The final insult in that one was paying a $65 trade fee to sell 1000 shares that were worth less than 1 cent total. I had no choice. If I wanted to claim it on my taxes I had to sell them.
SCO is really scrambling now
Personally I never believe any company is dying until Netcraft confirms it.
Because there are still people believing that a company that makes such outrageous claims must have an ace up its sleeve.
I thought I had died, I haven't seen SCO in the news for weeks.
SimonTek
Who ever is instrumental for this already got away with the money. They are trying to lick the leftovers from the plate now. The funny thing is somebody lost and its not us(Open Source people), its the people who bought the stock.
One thing is for sure, this whole fiasco made more good publicity to FOSS. More people know about linux and more importantly what open source is.
Besides, the downward trend has been going for some time - they were hovering around $7 last week, now they've dropped a dollar since. So one day's stock variations is not going to make or break somebody in the general sense.
This sig no verb.
Novell. SCO. Canopy.
I don't trust 'em.
Google's results are based on a democratically perceived relavence. In other words, the reason why GrokLaw is #5 doesn't mean they have the 5th largest source of SCO stuff, it means they are the 5th most linked to site from other sites that have the word SCO on them. In otherwords, if that many people felt Groklaw was reliable enough to put links to it from their page, then Google can be fairly sure that their site holds relavence to your search.
So yes, in theory, if a particular site could get every page on the internet to have a hyperlink to it, then it would appear #1 on every search that contained a word that was on that page, even if the page held no gramatical structure or information.
So, no, Groklaw is not the top Anti-Sco site on the net, nor is it the 5th ranked one. It just happens to contain the 5th most relavent source of info on SCO as perceived by other webmasters regardless of whether the content if pro, anti, or just a neutral view.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Since Novell bought SuSe they are now a Linux distributor and bound by the terms of the GPL. If Novell owns the Unix copyrights (looks like they do from what I read on Groklaw), we're all VERY safe from them attempting to pull an SCO.
Personally, I'd worry more about "submarine" software patents that someone will suddenly complain are being infringed ala PanIP, RAMBUS, et al. You will note how easily IBM was able to find four patents for their counter-suit against SCO.
(You can go back to worrying now)
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
No, no. Not the NRF part. Sure that's significant and interesting and all..
Look at the Groklaw link. It seems to be saying that SCO has dropped all claims that IBM did anything illegal with Linux kernel code. They're only pusrsuing the claim that IBM shouldn't be selling AIX and Dynix anymore (which is a pretty laughable claim, anyway).
Has SCO backed off of all Linux claims?!?
It's called Groklaw, and I couldn't agree more - they don't need Slashdot's help.
Don't be so sure. I now personally that Darl has all five of them up his... ...WAIT a minute!!!
...and they said to get back to the store. There's some stocking to be done.
For those of you who think it's kind of odd that a CIO is offering what's a legal opinion - yes it it. The NRF is the largest retail lobbying association. But it's all just a small office in DC. (Used to have a larger office in NYC but the biggest retailers didn't like that some of their dues where going to the NY office's mainly educational mission, which was of most worth to small retail members who didn't have their own in-house educational arm. So they staged a coup in the early nineties and moved the focus just to the lobbying branch in DC.)
Anyway, the NRF has a handful of people given the same titles as typical top retail executives, including CIO and VP of this and that. Each of these has about one person reporting to them - the title is more so that when they organize conferences in their areas they'll have equivalent rank to the top attendees. Most of the have actual backgrounds elsewhere in the departments they're posing as head of, but they're all basically retired from that and in a second career with the trade association.
So this is not a lawyer saying this, and not even a real, current CIO. The NRF has on retainer some of the biggest names in American law. Might make you wonder why they didn't have one of them make the statement (although it's a sure bet one of them put these words in the CIO's mouth). All a bit odd....
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'm sure none of this was a surprise to anybody. If SCO could only put itsself out of its own misery... I wonder what the outcome of the court cases will do to SCO (pending the judgement we all know is the right one).
Props to GNAA!
The conundrum is that it took a major corporation to back Linux to bring an Evil Corporation out to sue, necessitating the corporate backing to withstand it.
In other news... The NRF noticed the sun rose today and expects this trend to continue tommorow.
You think this is a serious reaction to SCO? Feh...forget the NRF's stance on it...I'm waiting for the NRA'S response!
(emphasis added to enhance tonality)
Do you really read all stories on slashdot? I call you system administrator.
Until the final death knell, traders basically are in it for two reasons: (1) to make a buck, (2) to have fun playing a risky game. They will keep kicking the price around as long as they can force the price up and down, even if the overall trend is down and will hit zero eventually, traders will drive it up and down making money on every change. When the price tanks because all the real investors bail out, the gamblers will lose interest too and the price will tank towards zero.
Verisign, Inc.
Kmart Corporation
GO Software
Hewlett-Packard Company
LexisNexis - PeopleWise
South Dakota State University
Washington State University
Southern New Hampshire University
for more see here
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Go figure!
Help fight continental drift.
In related news, the NRF has released another report explaining that the sky is blue.
The price of a share of stock is supposed to be the total assets of a company minus the total liabilities divided by the number of shares (outstanding and otherwise).
(TA - TL) / S
This number will go up if the company earns money and will go down if it loses money. The stock market price of a share takes into account how much money the company is expected to earn or lose over the short term. If a company is expected to earn X amount over the next quarter, then their value at the end of the quarter compared with the previous quarter would be:
(TA - TL) + X
and their value per share:
((TA - TL) + X) / S
So, if you think the company will earn money, you pay more for the stock because next quarter it will be shown to be worth it. If you think the company will lose money, you pay less for the stock because next quarter you will be able to buy the stock for less. The things that influence your determination of the price at the end of the quarter change constantly. However, even if the company goes out of business, you still get your shares' value of the company. If SCOX owns a building worth a million dollars, and has a loan on that building for $250,000 and they lose $500,000 over the next quarter and decide to go out of business, you still get your portion of the remaining $250,000:
((1,000,000 - 250,000) - 500,000) / S
In order for a stock to be zero for a company, they would have to find someone willing to loan them money equal to the amount of holdings they have and at the same time lose money. This would be like you trying to borrow all of the money to buy a house without having a job (or at best a job that didn't cover your expenses plus the price of the house). Nobody has credit that good, and neither do corporations.
I think "dropped" usually means "went down" -- of course, SCOX's stock was actually a little under $4 one year ago, so it's UP over the last year!
This is getting confusing, first retailers and their drone producng corporate atmosphere are the devil one day, then just have them utter some blurb about SCO and now they are Mother Teresa incarnate? You guys need to make up your mind.
SCO has only sold $20,000 in Linux licenses the last quarter. That's a little over 25 licenses. Guess there really isn't much of a line to buy a printed piece of paper that gets you nothing.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
In my opinion, it is almost as if The SCO Group's business model is to generate a revenue stream through litigation.
Hasn't SCO said this? I don't think it's "opinion" or "almost if". I believe SCO said this, but if they didn't, their invester BayStar certainly did.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
If I wanted to claim it on my taxes I had to sell them. Not exactly. I have claimed worthless stock many times on my tax returns. After all if the company goes completely under, there won't be any stock to trade. I am not sure what the criteria is and nor do I feel like looking it up, but if a stock is considered worthless you can still claim it on your taxes without selling it. Perhaps there is a waiting period and you just wanted to claim it before the waiting period expired?
Just this morning I was thinking it was time I looked into shorting SCO stock. I missed out.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The National Retail Federation has members that stand to be sued by SCO if SCO's claims are true. Of course NRF is going to say that SCO's claims are meritless. Like SCO, NRF is looking out for number one!
$_from_members_using_Linux > $_to_fight_SCO
If it were the other way around, the NRF would probably be pushing members to abandon Linux as we speak.
Keeping memebers and avoiding legal battles is all NRF cares about. That's not a bad thing, but it does make them a little biased when evaluating the SCO legal battles.
If you read some more Groklaw, especially here, when the filing first came out, you will see that SCO is still calling the GPL unenforceable, inapplicable, and so on, and IBM still claims that SCO's GPL violations are causing harm. So it will still be an issue in the suit and countersuit.
Specifically (I feel stupid quoting myself, but):
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
And even funnier - if SCO admits that IBM did nothing wrong other than continue to use AIX and Dynix after they "terminated" the licenses (even though IBM says the licenses are perpetual and cannot be terminated), how can they explain to a judge why the licenses were terminated in the first place?
Nothing new here... move along now...
Not quite right: 1. It shouldn't be X in (TA-TL)+X, but the Net Present Value of X, as time preference figures into it. 2. X is the sum of all future expected revenue minus all future expected losses, not the revenues for any fixed time horizon (Though NPV approaches 0 for the more distant future.). 3. The price of a stock is actually often only partially related to the "technical" value, as the subjective valuations of a huge number of investors can set a value with little relationship to any technical analysis of the stock's value. Otherwise, as a description of technical analysis of stock value, you are correct.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
I have claimed worthless stock many times on my tax returns.
Have you ever been audited? The stock I had was not worthless, it was just worth a very small amount. The point is that I still owned it. You cannot claim loss until you actually lose the money which happens when you sell. Just like any other stock. If you buy a stock at $10 and it goes to $.01, you cannot claim a loss unless you sell it (even though it is essentially worthless.) It does not matter how little value it has as long as it has some value and you still own it, you cannot claim it. And if you ever get audited, I am sure they will happily point that out.
Don't piss off the Feringi federation
Why did you use a google cache? Did you think we would /. yahoo.com?
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
The day is now complete we have gotten to bash Microsoft and SCO all in the same day. Oh wait I am forgetting in Soviet Russia..
Oh well, I'm going home anyway.
Not to mention that all stocks dipped slightly when the feds announced the intrest rates woudl remain the same.
SCO's quarter ended last Friday Apr 30.
Any idea when results will be availabe? How wonderfully profitable has SCO's "business" been this past quarter? How many SCOsource licenses did they sell? Did they lose more money than last quarter?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This says it all. OWNED!
Props to GNAA!
Don't you mean happy trials? :)
Here here! I only read these posts to be amused by the mindless vitriol of the fanboys, but I am starting to wish for another arena for that. I wish I could never see 'groklaw has a great article about it' again.
WE KNOW!
They caved in and dropped Linux support for a database they sell. Is this the first educational institution that has sold out?
Eat Lamb, 1 million coyotes can't be wrong
The significance of the National Retail Federation speaking out against SCOX may be deeper than some realize. One of SCO Unix's core markets (if not the only one) was/is retail point of sale systems. In the 1980s and early 90s, SCO Unix (and its Xenix predecessor) was one of the few choices available to run a POS system on affordable PC hardware. If SCO Unix has any market left, it is the members of the NRF, many of whom have large deployments of SCO Unix throughout their store chains. Who even runs SCO Unix anymore? The answer is these people. The companies in the NRF comprise the SCO Unix core market, and if SCOX plans on continuing to sell software to businesses, it needs them.
But now, these companies, the last customers SCOX has, have turned against them. With their previously existing relationship, SCOX could have been in a good position to sell them Linux, but they have ruined that opportunity now. What tiny market SCO Unix had is gone, and any hope SCOX had of continuing to be a software company just went with it.
On the other hand, their litigation isn't going well either. Better say goodbye, folks, because SCOX is not long for this world.
--Mythos
The market is losing interest in SCOX. It's clear now that there's no big near-term win there.
It's hard to get excited about a press release from a lobbyist from a trade association, especially when it doesn't announce any action. But it's good to have statements like that, because it discourages Congressional action. Recall that SCO was lobbying Congress at one point. With IBM, Damlier-Chrysler, Utah's Novell, Goldman Sachs, and the National Retail Federation against SCO, Congress isn't going to do anything stupid.
The real action is in the SCO vs IBM lawsuit, where SCO is not doing well. SCO has narrowed their copyright claim. SCO had a deadline coming up on the discovery front, where they have to disclose the "infringing code". They're close to the "put up or shut up" point in that case. They've stalled and stalled, but it didn't work. One motion at a time, IBM has whittled away at SCO's claims. The trade secret claim is gone. The copyright claims are steadily shrinking. The claim that the GPL is "unconstitutional" is gone. Meanwhile, IBM's claims against SCO threaten SCO's remaining cash.
I am not a CPA, but during tax season, an "tax expert" on CNN mentioned that you can claim stock losses without having to sell the stock. The scenario he specifically mentioned was if you had some old dotcom stock in now defunct companies that you paid good money way back when.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Amazing that a website made by a paralegal can be taken as gospel.
It isn't the paralegal's words that are taken as gospel. Those words are just opinion.
The credibility of that opinion, and the opinion of people commenting in the discussion rests on the mountains of information that Groklaw compiles in one convenient place.
SCO press releases. All manner of court filings. All relevant press coverage. Transcripts of court hearings. (And there is an important one comming up on May 11.) SEC filings.
All of that information is verifiable. Just follow the collected links back to their original sources. Download scanned PDF's of court documents. Or better go to the courthouse and get your own copies of originals from the court clerk.
Groklaw is credible because the collected facts of what SCO says in court, says to the SEC, and then says in the press paints a picture that any reasonable person can see. Too bad it is embarrasing for poor SCO to have all this information conveniently collected and available for comparison in one place.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Until quite recently, SCO were also the top result for "bastards", an amusing side-effect of the "litigious bastards" googlebombing.
If you search right now (I just checked) they don't appear on the first page for any of those searches. Google infuriate me sometimes. On the one hand they claim to be using the democratic nature of the web and all that, but when 2,200 people work together to pull off an innocent prank someone at Google manually overrides the result!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
My former company bought a unixware license a few months ago.
Just one,
but I suppose it might be enough to keep Darl in 50cent packets of ramen noodles whilst the lawyers divide up their millions in fees.....
For productivity, SCO needs a good lie management software package.
Maybe Microsoft could write them one?
You know what they say about telling lies leads to the need to tell bigger lies. Sheesh, didn't Darl learn that as a kid?
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
That's not it either. Groklaw is the 5th most relevant source of info on "SCO" as perceived by Google. Unless you actually work there you probably don't know how or why Google thinks it should be number 5.
Because the thing is that Novell is selling linux, and in fact owns SUSE and Ximian, and as a result are bound by the terms of the GPL.
The neat thing about the GPL is its seemingly foolproof method of making sure everyone plays fair: they make it in everyone's interests to play fair, by making everyone not just borrow from everyone else, but depend on everyone else.
For example, let's say a company releases a piece of software under the GPL, then the next day decides to recant and announces that no, we changed our mind, it wasn't GPLed after all. If the company never sold anyone a copy, just put it up for download on a website, well then, who's to disagree with them? If someone had given them money for it that could be construed as having some sort of contractual validity, and the license that they included when they originally distributed the license irrevocable. But if it was just a free download, and the license included with the download as a written offer... well that's kind of fuzzier, isn't it? It would seem the company couldn't "go back" on their license offer, but the company could claim all kinds of things. They could claim the release was "unauthorized", or not intended for public release outside the company, or there were mitigating copyright and contractual cirucmstances the company was not aware of at the time doctrine of mutual mistake blah blah blah. And if this were the BSD license, that's where things would end.
But the GPL, among doing other things, adds an interesting wrinkle to things by legally intertwining to a certain extent everyone who cooperates using it. If someone releases some code they own under the GPL, they still own it and can do whatever they like with that code outside the context of the GPLed product However if someone is distributing or redistributing a product containing someone else's GPL code-- anyone's-- then they suddenly find themselves with a small and reasonable, but important, set of obligations.
So, here's another hypothetical example. Let's say Novell announces they own lines 5000-5435 of the linux kernel; that those lines were stolen from NetWare by a disgruntled employee who then submitted them to Linux as his own work at some point; that they have indisputable proof of this; and they further announce that anyone who wants to sell linux owes them $699 a copy for Novell's 435 lines of code there.
The problem here is that they can't do that; the instant Novell points out those 435 lines of code are unlicensed, distributing Linux becomes illegal, period. The reason for this is that the GPL says that in order to distribute under the GPL, you must be able to offer to anyone who you distribute it to an unlimited GPL license themselves, which includes the right to freely redistribute and modify. If you don't have the rights to distribute Linux under the GPL, you certainly don't have the right to distribute Linux by any other mechanism. And if you have to pay $699 to distribute the Linux kernel, then you don't have the right to distribute it under the GPL. The rest of Linux, everything except those 435 lines, is still GPLed and freely distributable; but the whole package, or any package that contains those 435 non-Free lines linked against GPL code, is something nobody-- including Novell-- has the right to distribute at all until those lines are removed or replaced.
So, Novell currently lacks the ability to attack Linux in this fashion without losing the right to sell Linux in the process-- which would be a major problem for them since they currently have a decent amount riding on their Linux-based products. And the really fun thing is, if Novell does as SCO did after raising their apparently fraudulent claims against Linux, and continues to distribute Linux even after they make the public claim that they own code in Linux that they never gave Linux a license to, then one of
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Nevertheless, looking at your article history, you don't seem to be a troll. So, one tip: Go to your preferences, and exclude Caldera from the homepage. Voila, you won't see those articles any more. Others, who want to see them because they don't have the time to read Groklaw, can leave that flag on.
See, best of both worlds for all of us.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
It's good to see the retailers to tell SCO to put it where the sun don't shine.
On affordable hardware?
When I first saw this article, I thought SCO were trying to sue the NRA.
But if the company is bankrupt, dissolved and de-listed, what exactly do you "own"? You can't even sell the thing anymore.
...if SCO won the lawsuit and officially "owned" Linux. If only to see the rebellion the Slashdotters would throw against them. ...I've always liked CalderaDOS.
But when the alternative is MS - with a pretty similar record for EULAS and draconian IP efforts - SCO is a bit like noise.
AIK
I was referring more to the kind of clout an organization like this has, than their truth-handling ability.
When this sluggish market-force monster rears its ugly head and blasts SCO with this strength, there is even less chance that any white knight will come to the rescue of SCO (the princess in the tower? nah, the warty witch).
SCO should have let this sleeping dragon lie.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
"meritless". In a later announcement, they announced that today is Wednesday.
- Caused major corporates like IBM and HP to assess how important FOSS is to them, and act accordingly
- Probably influenced the acquisition of SuSE by Novell, and helped commercialise Linux
- Raised the profile of Linux in the world at large, by making business analysts realise there is something here that people will fight over
- Probably speeded up improvements in the FOSS creation process, helping to ensure that its IP status is robust
- Made a heroine of PJ
- Given the entire IT industry a new hate figure to mold in wax and stick pins in, doubtless helping Bill G sleep better at nights of the full moon
- Enriched several poor and deserving attorneys and helped to ensure that neither DaimlerChrysler nor Porsche have too many layoffs
- Further educated some of the people who thought they understood the stock market
Darl McB deserves some sort of award for all this. With his remarkable combination of tact, diplomacy and tireless negotation, he should at least be made Ambassador to Iraq.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
you whiny little prick, why don't you moderate things for fun instead of being so serious. get a life, this is slashdot. "i could have modded you offtopic"...oooooo, scary!
Strong sell.
Analyst Opinion of SCOX.
Non illegemati carborundum est!
I had a stock certificate for four shares of Wang Laboratories, Inc. stock which had a "par value" of $0.50 per share, and thus would have been worth $2.00 except that I would have had to file some paperwork when Wang went chapter 11 and was briefly reorganized... ...but I was able to sell it to a scripophily dealer for $10.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The SCO Group claims that they hold the copyright to Unix and believes that retailers who use Linux violate SCO's copyright.
If I understand this properly, using a product such as Linux isn't violating a copyright. IF (and that's a BIG IF) SCO is correct, how can they sue these companies for use of a product they are NOT selling? Copyright laws basically define who can provide copies of a product. If you are using a product provided by a manufacturer (say RedHat or SuSE), then you are not responsible for their product and what the manufacturer put into it.
If I read a newspaper article and it contained copyrighted material, am I responsible and liable to being sued? Not a chance. That's not how the law works.
SCO can sue until they are bankrupt. They will not survive their own lunacy.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
For a corporation which has issued only one type of stock, this is true. However, in the real world, most companies issue several classes of stock, and some classes have preference attached. Preference essentially means that those shares are entitled to be paid first in the event of liquidation. There are also shares which are convertible to notes, shares which are redeemable for cash, shares which have options associated with them, and a huge array of other convoluted forms of preference. Typically preferred stock is sold to early investors in a private company. So in your example of a company with a book value of $250,000, if there are 1,000,000 shares outstanding, of which 10,000 are preferred or convertible at $10, $100,000 will be paid to the preferred shareholders on liquidation, leaving $150,000 for the remaining 990,000 shares. In reality it's normally not this rosy; there's rarely enough left in a liquidation to pay even the noteholders (mainly banks), and it's not unusual for the preferred shareholders to receive little or nothing as well. For a common shareholder to receive liquidation proceeds is almost unheard-of. If the company has enough value left that it could pay common shareholders after liquidation, there's probably no reason to liquidate. After all, most companies that liquidate have negative book value anyway.
This is why companies wishing to make an IPO often try to reduce their level of preference in outstanding shares; institutional investors especially will be less interested if a company has $100M worth of preference and only a $50M book value. Such a company is poorly positioned for an offering. Sometimes preferred stock is convertible to common stock and/or notes, and in some cases the preferred shareholders will exercise these options so that an IPO can go forward on better terms.
wrong indentation style.
Actually you can claim a loss. . . BUT they're strict in defining what a "worthless security" is. Search on irs.gov for it or go here:
S ec urities.html
http://www.turbotax.com/articles/FAQonWorthless
Right now SCO's stock is up .20 over yesterday's close. But we have another 1.5 hours till the NYSE closes.
I am happy to report that I just today switched over to a server that is not tainted by an SCO license. I was really glad to ditch the one hosted by a certain provider in Texas who caved in to SCO's bluster a few months back.
Open source doesn't need corporate backing in order to survive. The corporate backing may speed up the development process of many pieces of OSS and may even bring some extra innovations to them, but the survival of OSS is independent of this. That is due to the inherent nature of OSS. When a free piece of software is published under the GPL it gets merged into our digital cultural heritage. Corporations will come and go, empires will rise and fall, but OSS will be around till the end of our civilization.
It was down that low before the news. Investors were beginning to notice the "painting" and other often illegal stock manipulation tactics that were being used to keep SCOX sailing. Royce is one of the prime suspects behind the stock manipulation, having invested $30 million dollars in SCOX through Baystar, and gradually increasing their investment by a small few thousand shares at a time, around the open and close of the market, when most of the suspected "painting" has occurred. The SCOX price always went UP on bad news, an almost sure sign of illegal stock manipulation. Another thing that was keeping the SCOX price up was a $45 price target set by "analyst" Brian Skiba. That price target was recently pulled, leaving only a more realistic, albiet still high $5 price target on the SCOX summary pages of most financial sites.
Today, SCOX price has risen slightly again, on a day when their perceived value should have dropped due to bad news. I have no doubt that the stock manipulation is still going on.
Note: This is all stuff I've read in the Yahoo! SCOX forum, nothing I deserve credit for researching myself.
all those claims? the people who bought licenses? surely, that was revenue also?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
There are already Point Of Sale systems for Linux, and with the announcement of the IBM Retail Environment for SuSE Linux, that will give retailers more assurance that it's safe to use Linux.
True, but perhaps they are saying this because they have a financial interest in cheaply available software, rather than out of the goodness of their hearts? I don't think this is a case of a large organization that "can't be wrong" (downthread) or of them really believing it's a "false claim" so much as businesses protecting their business interests.
Maybe I should have a little more faith in giant, giant trade organizations to always act in the way that's best for the world and for justice rather than for what will fill their wallets.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Indeed, the way Google works allows for something called "google-bombing", where if enough people (such as e.g. bloggers who know each other) link to a certain site using certain keywords, then that site can become the top result for a keyword (or keywords) even if the site has no content at all relating to that keyword. And interestingly enough a recent example of this was again related to SCO ... a few months ago, if you typed "bastards" into google, the top result was the main page of www.thescogroup.com :) ... yet one can be fairly certain that SCO's web page did not contain information about 'bastards' or could have been construed as a reliable source of information about bastards. (Now it seems it's not even in the top 100 results though.)
With heavy pressure on current clients. Next step: send some muscle over to "take care of things." Hey Vito, got a job for ya...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Actually it's very well-known that Google's rankings for a site are largely based on the keywords that other webmasters use to link to that site. What isn't known is the precise formulas, of course, for how they calculate the rankings precisely, but one can see the effect working very clearly even without knowing the exact numbers. But if Google ranks a site as number 5 for the keyword "SCO", it is because many webmasters use "SCO" in the HREF text when linking to that site. Google does not use humans to sit and rank pages, it's all automated, except when they manually block sites for abusive practices. So one does know how AND why google thinks it should be number 5 - very simply because only four other sites on the Internet have been linked to more often with "SCO" in the HREF text. This is known and not secret.
If laying of a "few" people can turn SCO "profitable", man, that's one sad company. I think the most interesting part will be to see exactly what departments got the ax. We all know they don't need any programmers there anymore except as "token", as in "See, we still have a technical staff" bullshit.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Raise your hand if you give a flaming fuck about SCO because you think it'll change the legitimacy of Linux as a viable business platform?
Alright... raise your hand if you're just like watchin SCO squirm, and you just wanna kick it a bit.
Riiiiight.
News for Nerds, Stuff for Schadenfreude.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: SCO is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SCO community when Groklaw confirmed that the Unixware market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SCO has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SCO is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by a plummeting stock price and increasingly desperate press releases.
You don't need to be a PJ to predict SCO's future...
(You can fill in the rest yourself.)
It's not "nervous nellies", it's suckers. There is one born every minute. Just because somebody is a CIO that does not mean they are not suckers. In fact my anecdotal evidence suggests that a greter percentage of CIOs are suckers compared to the general populace.
evil is as evil does
They are not 'Meritless'.
They are 'Not even meritless'.
Please someone explain to me this part of their website?
NATIONAL RETAIL FEDERATION
THE VOICE OF RETAIL WORLDWIDE
Shouldn't that be The Voice of Retail Nationwide?
Maybe The Voice of American Retail Worldwide?
While I am pleased that they agree that SCO is full of monkey muffins I would be more pleased if their Motto/Slogan was logical.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Ahhhh! The day SCOX drops below $1 and gets delisted!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...where "few" can be interpreted quite literally...
litigious bastards
Time makes more converts than reason
IT seems that was only partially successful. "Litigous bastards" turns up discussions about google bombing sco with that phrase :)
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Ah, thanks :). I just remember noticing that they were the top result for just the keyword "bastards" at some point.
it's sooo fancy this days to claim SCO are bad ... i mean how else you could make hordes of /.ters fall in love with you?
... i wonder why /. is not mentioning them!?
btw, i heard the biggest "walrus hunters association" also found SCO to be really bad
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Personally I never believe any company is dying until Netcraft confirms it.
:]
Will this do?
Sucks that Google apparently keeps manually hacking their results for this term, though.
The pigeons thought it looked good there, of course.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Wasn't the reason that SCO announced the termination of this to do with other infringements? Surely, without those other infringements, they can't terminate it?
I won't be at all surprised to see this case thrown out with prejudice (is that the right term). SCO will probably collapse, or IBM et al will just take them apart.
You got informative on this incorrect crock of BS because you used some equations? Maybe I can get modded up informative for making up a theory about what determines stock prices.
The official Wall St. groundhog, Punkasstowny Phil, pops his head out of Darl McBride's ass, and the number of times he sees his shadow is how they set the stock price. Oh yeah, and uh, E=MC^2.
Let's discuss some reality here. Stock price is based on perception and speculation. That is why a company's stock can move up and down from press releases. It is not at all directly tied to actual profit or revenue or assets of the company. (On an indirect level it looks like it because that is usually discussed by analysts, which influences perceptions.) The price is the meeting point of buyers and sellers. If there are people with shares who want to sell but no one wants to buy, the stock will go down because they are lowering the selling price until they can get someone to buy. Rising is the opposite--buyers are offering more until they can get someone to sell shares. If the company is not issuing new shares or doing a buy-back, they are not involved in the trading of their stock. It is just stockholders like you and me and brokerages shuffling it around, and the price is based on how much the shares are wanted or not wanted.
How do you think those dot-bomb companies were able to have stock prices that went up when all they ever did was lose investor capital instead of making a profit, or product, or anything?
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I don't know what is more ludicris, the fact that you took the time to write an anidote about an incident at church, or that you go to church. What is this, reader's digest?
What is this, reader's digest?
ludicris? anidote?
It would certainly pay *you* to increase *your* word power...
I think this graphic pretty much sums up the story despite the best efforts of a few corrupt investment brokers and lawyers.
WHen the stories about SCO first appeared here, we said anybody who worked for SCO would be marked and never hired again.
Well... GUESS WHAT.
It wasn't malice. Its common sense. Those guys are marked. Not by the rest of the world, but by SCO. SCO sues their customers and their partners. The only people who are safe are the ones who have never dealt with SCO.
That's not my desire, I wish it wasn't, but its a fact now.
you whiny little prick
This is slashdot.... you might feel a little prick.
As to daily fluctuations, studies going back nearly half a century show that short-term movements can be explained as well by the Random Walk theory as anything else.
To see what "The Street" really thinks about SCOX, take a look at the 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year price history.
You can't spell "fiasco" without "SCO"
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
naturally would buy 80085 shares or if the money was right 800713,5
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
So, no, Groklaw is not the top Anti-Sco site on the net...
Yea! Slashdot is the top Anti-SCO site on the net.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
So, how exactly did you manage to sell it?
Stock exchange systems make the process of locating a buying pretty invisible, but you still can't sell if there isn't someone who wants to buy.
Are there just people out there willing to take the gamble that it'll be worth something someday?
plus-good, double-plus-good
No, this should not have gotten modded "offtopic".
Off topic... NO. Redundent YES. Not that I don't agree with you expressing your feelings on this matter, but you'll note your parent post got modded down. It was vague and didn't really add anything to the thread. "Come on people" could mean a great many things.
Now your defence post was not vague, and could be argued it added something to the thread. I understand you don't care anymore. I'm sure many people would agree with your feelings on the subject of SCO. I would ask that you respect the fact that some of us do care for obvious reasons. This whole business of the old AT&T copyright mindfield is of great interest to many of us. How the courts deal with the ownership of something so old that has traded hands more often then a 2bit piece could affect all of us directly for decades to come.
Yes, it is group X says or SCO added this. I understand civil disputes are asinine and really NO fun to follow. But that's civil justice, two parties trying to convience a judge the other guy is wrong. Law is one of the most tediusly boring fields. Perhaps people will see the wisdom in offering a seperate topic relating to "IP disputes" For the time being, you can safely remove Caldera from your preferences and live your life SCO free.
And all the short sellers buying real stock to cover their positions...
Stock price is based on perception and speculation... It is not at all directly tied to actual profit or revenue or assets of the company
Perhaps in the extremely short term. It's obvious that sotck prices change minute-by-minute every day, and no one really has access to information about sales in that sort of resolution.
But long term, stock prices track earnings remarkably well.
Bubbles involving tulips or dot-coms are not only rare, but examples of short term "perceived" prices being corrected in the long term.
Brian Skiba and his assistant at Deutsche Bank both left to work for a company in California. The question to me is, if they left on their own, or if they were encouraged to leave after DB got a subpeona from IBM?
The SCOX stock price has been hovering at the $6.00 mark for the last couple days, always closing just above. It could be that a bunch of people have set things up so that they automatically purchase SCOX when it's less than $6.00. This isn't necessarily manipulation at all.
Zacks.com Announces That Mike Chrisman Highlights the Following Stocks: IPIX Corporation and SCO Group
Has SCO backed off of all Linux claims?!?
... This newly added counterclaim raises issues separate and apart from the primary breach of contract and other direct claims and counterclaims in this case. Given this fact, and to avoid multiple suits determining substantially similar issues, tis Court should decline to exercise jurisdicition over and dismiss Counterclaim Ten. In the alternative, jCounterclaim Ten should be stayed pending the outcome in the prior filed AutoZone case.
Nope, they've just realized IBM was the wrong company to pick that fight with. From their filing:
In other words, IBM is seeking to declare that a person or entity using Linux does not infringe upon SCO's copyrights and that some or all of SCO's copyrights are invalid and unenforceable. This precise issue will be litigated in a case filed by SCO against AutoZone in federal district court in Nevada; a case filed prior to the IBM filing its Tenth Counterclaim.
So SCO is saying that since they've withdrawn their copyright claims against IBM, and IBM didn't file the copyright vacation counterclaim before SCO filed the copyright suit against AutoZone, that SCO v. AutoZone should be the deciding case in the copyright claim, not SCO v. IBM. In short, they figure they're rolling the dice, and rolling the dice against IBM has worse odds than rolling the dice against AutoZone.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Stock exchange systems make the process of locating a buying pretty invisible, but you still can't sell if there isn't someone who wants to buy.
If you pay someone to buy worthless stock... they will buy it.
Are there just people out there willing to take the gamble that it'll be worth something someday?
Sure there are. I know of many a story of people who survived the depression who managed to keep some worthless stock only to be hunted down 50+ years later by headhunter lawers begging to give money for it. A company might hold some valuable patents, trademarks, a vast number of things that may have not been totally liquidated or ownership reverted back to the banks that funded them. Not to speak of contracts that may still exist.
Generally speaking you'd probally be more likely to make a profit from old comic books the likes of which you can buy at walmart for $1.00 for 5.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
One thing that I've noticed about Groklaw is the Slashdot Envy. There are far too many people on Groklaw who complain about Slashdot, make snide remarks about Slashdot, or make the claim that Slashdot is "inferior" to Groklaw.
Let Groklaw stand on its own merits. Putting Slashdot down makes Groklaw's cheerleaders look petty.
So, how exactly did you manage to sell it? Stock exchange systems make the process of locating a buying pretty invisible, but you still can't sell if there isn't someone who wants to buy.
Well, he had to pay the brokerage $65 to sell stock worth $10. If nothing else, the brokerage would be willing to buy the stock and pocket the $55 profit. Then when the stock eventually goes to zero, they can claim the $10 loss on their taxes. And if, by some fluke, it happens to go back up to $100, well, they just made $100K on shares someone paid them to take.
They really can't lose, so why would they not buy it?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I suspect that BSD will win over GPL in the end
(much as I appreciate the benefits of the GPL):
(1) Regardless of license, once some software gains traction, there is significant disincentive to use other software; for FOSS in particular, there is significant long run penalty to forking the code base.
(2) BSD is less restrictive and simpler to understand than GPL, so BSD more attractive to licensees, so BSD more attractive to developers seeking mindshare.
The most popular counterargument is that developers won't accept BSD for fear that big commercial interests (eg: MS) would exploit BSD-licensed code without giving anything in return. However:
(3) Even big BSD users won't dare fork the code base because of (1), or if they do, their efforts will be eclipsed by the critical mass on the trunk.
Ian
I first read this as "NERF calls SCO's Claims Meritless." I was wondering what the hell a soft football manufacturer would have to do with SCO. Boy, is my face red.
My userid is prime!
So if I were to write some code and release it under the GPL, could I simultaneously license the same code to a company that wants to add it to their proprietary product? Of course, that would lead to a fork, as any contributions made by others to the GPL version couldn't be given to the company (without their authors' permissions). Would I be able to make additions to both the GPL and proprietary branches, if the changes could be merged into both without having to involve code contributed by others to the GPL branch?
SCO is pushing for the case to be handled via AutoZone because then they're dealing with a company they might be able to out-stare in court.
IBM doesn't blink, and they have much deeper pockets than SCO. Here's hoping the judge recognizes SCO's request is the right approach, but that all the cases should be rolled in under IBM's.
SCO wanted to play hardball with the big boys, let the game proceed with the players they chose: SCO vs. IBM.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
two things
1 you work for Micro$ux
2.you are trolling for a paycheck
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
The US considers itself to be "the world". The rest of the planet is "a resource","labor units", or "target practice" (depending on whether or not your country has oil reserves, a friendly dictatorship, or the unfriendly dictatorship de jour). It's what happens when parochialism and paranoid xenophobia are promoted by a country's leaders for several generations.
The NRF isn't "the voice of American Retail Worldwide" either; that is part of what the Trade Department does.
So how does a bunch of retailers have the audacity to advertise themselves as being bigger than they are? That's never happened before in the history of retail? Or do you believe everything every retailer tells you (in which case, you're missing dozens of never-to-be-repeated offers RIGHT NOW on the home shopping channel! What are you waiting for?!? Phone NOW!! Stocks ARE LIMITED!!!).
If you don't get my point, I have a bridge to sell.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
And Yahoo! stock forumns are the place to go for financial advice.
Um, that's 80135 shares.
By the way, that spells "Boies"---you know, SCO's lawyer...
I get it now. This 40lb malnourished chimp has decided that taking on the 800lb gorilla was a bad idea, and has now chosen to taunt the 600lb gorilla instead.
Personally, I think it will never be shown again in syndication (because it has the WTC so prominently in Homer's bathroom jaunts).
But there's always DVD! Thanks.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.