Royal Bank of Canada Cashes Out of SCO; SCO Begins Layoffs

jbell99999 is the first one to submit news that the Royal Bank of Canada is divesting itself of SCO stock. They're selling part of their preferred stock to Baystar, which has already indicated that they want to redeem their shares, and converting the rest to regular stock, which they can presumably sell on the open market. In other SCO news, Versicherung writes "The Santa Cruz Sentinel is reporting, SCO is laying off 10 percent of its worldwide workforce. The cuts come less than a month after the company brought on a new chief financial officer and just before the company ended its second fiscal quarter April 30." See also stories at Eweek and Linuxinsider.com.

Comments

Intellectual Property Claims?

[Anonymous Coward]

He said BayStar had reached "the conclusion that SCO should focus its resources on its most valuable asset: its intellectual property claims."

I'm sorry, which intellectual property claims were those?

Does Baystar believe their claims of their source code in Linux are meritable?

Re:Bre-X

[IgnoramusMaximus]

You got it. Being a Canadian myself I would like to bask in the glory of us as a whole being smarter, better, more educated, more richeous etc., but...

Although it starts amongst joyous meadows and cheerful flowers, truly great evil this path leads to. Evil bearing names like Abu Gharib and My Lai.

So just note that it was Royal Bank who against all common sense invested in SCO in the first place. They are just now growing cold feet and preparing to run for the door.

Not HaHa! - This may be a very bad thing.

[ErikTheRed]

Ok, so while there is some short-term negative publicity around one major investor bailing, it leaves Baystar capital with much more power over SCO. It's widely conjectured that Baystar's recent abortive bailing-out was actually just a public slap to SCO to get them to make some executive changes. Now Baystar's leverage is increased substantially. It has occurred to myself and to others that what Baystar may be able to do is effectively "foreclose" on SCO - not in the traditional debt sense, but they'll be able to stick a gun to SCO's head and force them to replace board members under threat of Baystar's pulling out, which would effectively bankrupt SCO. Round one - replace the CFO. Round two - put some of our buddies here on the board to provide you with some sage advice.

Then we have Baystar (the Microsoft puppet) effectively inheriting all of the IP claims (by proxy, but the result is the same), which they think are meritorious. This could result in a whole new round of litigation run by someone who's not a complete jackass.

The new litigation may (will)also be a complete pile of bullshit, but it still ties things up in the courts for years. Be afraid, very afraid.