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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."
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%)
... 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...
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.
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.
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.
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?!?
Yes, I followed the links. They give me a pretty clear idea of how the NRF wishes to portray themselves, and seems to indicate that this is something of a largish public relations coup for the anti-SCO side of all this (I.E. everybody) which will serverely hamper SCO's efforts to convince small businesses they should let SCO extort money from them.
:)
However, it says very little about whether they hold any sort of capitalizable political power, or whether there's anything I missed giving the NRF direct relevance to SCO's legal cases, and I wondered if anyone here had had direct dealings with them and could give some sort of anecdotal demonstration of their actual importance. I was trying to, how you say, "provoke discussion".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
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
Yikes. One in five American workers and $3.8 trillion in Sales can't be wrong!
Or can they?
No.
They could be wrong. The size of the claimant does not indicate the validity of the claim.
In my opinion, at least it seems that the NRF has done some homework. Even if SCO was right, I'd think that they would still fight it unless it was a totally lost cause. They give up if thought that the cost of paying up would be lower than the legal costs, but I doubt that because SCO has diminishing funds to file lawsuits, in the several tens of millions at best, whereas that's a drop in the bucket compared to the retail industry.
I can think of a lot of people who would love to have that hanging framed on the wall then.
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
Novell's business depends on Linux going forward, because they're abandoning the NetWare kernel in favor of the Linux kernel. Even if they were to own the copyright on something vital to Linux, they couldn't license that to their customers without releasing it under the GPL, since that would violate the GPL on the rest of the kernel. So, even if they did have relevant copyrights and hadn't licensed the code out under the GPL, they would have to drop most of their product line to do anything about it. Note that the same was true of SCO, and that SCO isn't really selling things any more. Novell, on the other hand, has a whole lot more to lose than SCO ever did.
As far as I can tell, Canopy hasn't sold any of their stock. However, they suckered Baystar into putting 50 million in cash into this beast to prop up the value of their stock (Canopy's filings with the SEC indicate they own about 35 million dollars in SCOX, in other words about 40 percent of the company). At this point, Canopy only stands to lose big time if Baystar manages to get their 50 million dollars back. At that point, there's nothing left to prop up the share price, and Canopy bites the big one as the price continues its slide into oblivion.
From the Insider Trades reported with the SEC, you'll see many of the execs had been dumping a reasonable amount every month, though some of that selling stopped when the price started going down (perhaps Darl told them to stop selling, it was starting to look bad). However, several of the directors appear to have exercised and dumped at least half of their options holdings over the last few months. Some of the execs have been doing a bit of selling, but not all. I don't see much evidence from that of anything other than execs and directors trying to get out when the getting was good - most of them didn't make a fortune on their sales, maybe a few hundred grand, and the rest appear to be stock with a bunch of shares that aren't worth a ton any more.
I think this graphic pretty much sums up the story despite the best efforts of a few corrupt investment brokers and lawyers.
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
I hope you are correct. We all want the final ruling against SCO to be bullet proof.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.