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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.
Haha!
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again
Quite appropriate, don't you think?
....is Canadian shareholders are wiser than the US ones?
"Begins layoffs"? Where have you been, SCO has been laying off staff for months now.
In Santa Cruz, for example, they sliced their tech staff by like 80% or something.
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Free mobile porn
Man, that's a lot of attorneys out of work!
This news has me smilin' like the Enzyte Guy!
www.eFax.com are spammers
The subject says it all (at least to any Candians reading this).
Jason
ProfQuotes
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?
The link Slasdot.org
....
,lot of publicity (for sure) and a lot of hits on their website , so there's a new concept for you
or just the quote below...
Differently seen companies chasing their tails in copyright infringments, trade protocol violations and intellectual property rights are generally the ones which are going to fall pretty soon.
Short on cash and not being able to earn/fund the millions they were used to in the dotgone era they are metamorphosing into scavengers and opportunists
SCO is a shining example The crummy economy is bringing out the best in a lot of Companys, their legal team thinks, "we are getting irrelevant (as a team) , lets think up something to make some money and make sure we dont' get laid off," "hmmm... patent # 5551212 seems to be worth looking into" and there starts their Road to Hell [lyricsdepot.com]
Easy money (or so they think)
the legal team is now the marketing team
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
Ouch - currently, 50% of the total float of SCOX (the SCO Stock) is shorted.
So, for every person betting it is going to go up, there is someone betting it will go down.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
... that none of those layed off are lawyers?
Say what you want about the policies or politics of SCO, it is always unfortunate when large numbers of people are laid off due to the problems of the company (ie those who made the bad decisions get to keep their cushy jobs).
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The strange thing about SCOX stock is the volume is very tiny.
Today it was 64,035. That's about the equivalent of 2 day-traders flipping the stock back and forth.
What does that mean? Nobody is interested in buying or selling this thing.
Minion to Darl:
".. We've analysed their attack sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your ship standing by?"
3C
Regards,
John, human
Falling You - beautiful
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
... that MS is going to end up buying SCO. Then MS will probably GPL Unix, drop all the IP suits and end up trying to look like the good guys.
Free Firefox news reader.
Just so ya know, Bert Young has a experience in helping companies that are basically dead in the water keep up the illusion of growth right up to the moment of reckoning. The GL has a story on it here.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
1. Stop suing them.
2. Then start selling an actual product.
3. Profit.
I can't wait to see how Laura Didio spins this one as a plus for SCO.
- Have a product
- that is involved in sales
- to customers
- generating revenue
SCO seems to have none of these things.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
From SCO.com:
Q. How many people does The SCO Group employ? A. As of April 30, 2003, 339 employees.
From the article:
Stowell said the cuts totaled less than 10 percent of the company's total worldwide work force of 275. There were cuts, however, earlier in the quarter as well. In March the company reported 305 employees, including 73 in Santa Cruz.
339 - 275 = 64 positions gone from April 2003 to May 2004, not including these layoffs. Jeez.
I do fear that the next spin on this will be martyrdom, Poor little SCO couldn't get justice before it was forced to its knees by the brutal linux movement sponsored by the behemoth IBM, or something to that effect.
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According to Zdnet those being laid off are mostly in the engineering, marketing, and sales depatments. This is very telling for a so-called "tech" company to lay-off those responsible for creating and selling your core product. Of course we all know that SCO is a litigation company and has no need for engineers to improve a product, no marketers to hype the non-existant product, and no salesmen to.... well you get the idea.
I also deal heavily with RBC and almost did switch banks. I stayed with them only because they gave me the best service. However I did shuffle my mutual funds to non-sco funds and was clear about my reasons for doing so. At this point I am just relieved that RBC is no longer involved in this mess .
I completely agree. It is great to hear that SCO is losing their court battles but it is tough to hear people getting laid off. Now all those people have SCO as their last place of employment, that has gotta hurt.
I ask for a car and I get a computer. How's about that for being born under a bad
Managerial Aptitude Test
Q. Your the captain of a ship commanding 100 sailors. Your carrying valuable cargo you need to sell for the owner of the ship. It appears there is a hole in your ship and water is coming in fast. What's do you do?
A. Find out what's wrong and fix it
B. Tell the sailors to start bailing water and sing something happy while they do it
C. Start looking around for at the other ships pilot since this once hasn't got long
D. Move the Cargo to your personal dingy and set sail
E. Tell everyone "This is not happening, everything is normal, the ship cannot be sinking, we take precautions, you know" and remain calm. (Erik the Viking)
F. Start throwing sailors into the sea until to lighten the load?
Just to add another point of view... this may be a bad thing.
[usual disclaimers here; I'm a layperson who has to deal with issues related to things like this occasionally]
The difference between a real company and an intellectual property holding company is that a real company has some skin in the game when it comes to treating patents as trading cards. An IP holding company doesn't.
As a simple example, consider two companies, "A" and "B", with a patent portfolio of 100 patents each, and real products that they are trying to sell.
When company A says to company B "you're infringing patent A17", B can use its portfolio defensively, and come back with "yes, but you're infringing patent B34; let's trade licenses".
If company A is an IP holding company, there's nothing company B can do but pay whatever extortionate price: Company A has no product, and is therefore not infringing any of B's IP. B is pretty much hanging in the wind.
The only place this isn't true is where B has some IP that A acknowledges is the basis of derivative IP held by A, _and_ A values the ability to continue sublicensing it without B raising sublicense fees for the original work in response to the extortion suit.
IF SCO is, effectively shedding their vulnerable assets, and IF they really have IP assets, this could be an entrenchment where it could end up being very hard to dig them out for a very long time.
The only real recourse to this sort of business model is for company B to attack companies that are infringing B's portfolio, and which are owned by the same people who own company A - effectively countering extortion with blackmail.
Yeah, I'm one of those people who think we need intellectual property law reform.
-- Terry
Will the last lawyer out of the building please turn off the lights?
Good Lord. RBC is not divesting itself of SCO stock. They are converting preferred to common. Whole different thing.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
as apparently Mr. Burns is running SCO and has a whole team of Homer Simpsons working for him. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This is neither a flame nor usual SCO bashing.
My impression of SCO was it was the product you bought 10 years ago because that power accounting and database software was written for it, dated but does the job and has never rarely failed. Near as I'm aware, they had a somewhat stable customer base, and while they didn't inovate, they started to incorperate much in the way of OSS in order to keep up with the pack, and perhaps actually get some new customers. Selling them old old and true power apps, but save them lots of money by giving them Samba.
I am curious about one thing. What if SCO never fired the first shot in this IP war? Would they still need to downsize? Would they still be considered a dying company? Would it be possible for SCO to continue to exist supplying to main stream folk or would they have simply continued to fade away? After all a successful company isn't always the one with the most money, but one which has found a balance between supply and demand, much easier with a software company then one which produces a physical product.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
They don't want out. Baystar was using the threat of dumping their stock to keep SCO managment in line. They wanted SCO to halt what was left of their software development and sales operations and "concentrate on IP licensing and enforcment". Darl and co. agreed, Baystar withdrew their threat, and now we're seeing the last of SCO's programmers getting downsized.
0 1 - just my two bits
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.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Wonder if their webmaster's making fun of them. In addition the funny image, of course netcraft confirms baystar's running BSD. Does that mean they're dead?
In A.D. 2003
....
War was beginning
Darl: What happen?
Blake: Somebody set up us the DDOS.
Mark: We get signal.
Darl: What!
Blake: Main screen turn on.
Darl: It's You!!
Linus: How are you gentlemen!!
Linus: All your IP are belong to us.
Linus: You are on the way to destruction.
Darl: What you say!!
Linus: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Linus: Ha Ha Ha Ha
Darl: Take off every 'IP claim'!!
Blake: You know what you doing.
Darl: Move 'IP claim'.
Darl: For great injustice.
Baystar has what, $80 million in SCO?
What? The original Baystar/RBC investment was $50 million combined, of which, Baystar's part was $20 million. RBC picked up the other $30 million. Today, RBC converted one-third of its investment into SCOX common stock. The remaining two-thirds was sold to Baystar for an undisclosed sum of money, but you can bet it's a helluvalot less than the original $20 million Baystar spent for the same quantity of Series A-1 shares in October.
To be blunt, RBC took it in the shorts on this investment. Baystar screwed them hard. Baystar hooked RBC up with the original PIPE, and then turned around and flushed the value down the toilet with their notice to SCO that they intended to get their money back. They didn't give any indication to RBC about the grounds they were using to justify their demand for the return of capital, so RBC had to stand by and watch their own deadline for making a similar demand expire.
Once that deadline passed, Baystar effectively had first-dibs on picking over SCO's carcass in an ensuing fight. RBC would have to wait until after Baystar got its money back (even though Baystar's investment was smaller) before making any attempt to recover its own investment. This forced RBC's hand. They could sit around and watch their entire $30 million get flushed down the drain, or they could sell (at a loss) most of their investment to Baystar and convert the rest to common stock (at a price that's nearly 2.5x the market price for those common stock shares) in the hopes that they'll get something if SCO wins the lottery.
Unless RBC never expected to make money on this deal for some obscure tax benefit, they got hosed badly. I'd expect to see the idiot at RBC who signed off on this deal resigning very soon to "pursue other opportunities."
Baystar, meanwhile, doubles their position in SCO's Series A-1 convertible preferred stock for a sum that's almost certainly a lot less than the $20 million they paid for the other 20,000 shares, thus reducing their average share price and giving them an ironclad fist around SCO's throat.
Baystar's not as stupid as we originally thought. RBC, meanwhile, comes off looking much stupider than we originally thought.
Remember that IBM may have a substantial claim against SCO, Novell, claims it actually owns the IP, and even Red Hat may get a whack.
Best case scenario is (a) Novell does in fact show that it owns SYS V (because all claims against Unix would be gone because Novell has released GPL code (b) IBM wins the suit and owns the remaining SCO assets (c) Daryl freaks and essentially closes the company (d) Baystar is left holding the bag (e) some DA grows a set and starts an investigation and indicts a lot of people
You've got to admit, that would be justice in every quarter. Complete win for Linux.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
They've just managed to half their money with this deal, rather than try to get blood out of the SCO stone they're converting to common stock which they're entitled to do, but if you look at the numbers each $1000 preferred share becomes several shares of common stock valued at around $440. Excuse me for finding this hillarious. They thought they could make a quick buck by funsing a viscious and meritless intellectual property attack on IBM and the Linux community in general. Now they're paying the price. I just hope SCO stock tanks some more before these Canadian vultures can cash out.
As for Baystar trying to get blood out of the stone they helped forge, same story, let's hope they never recoup their cash. Maybe it'll be a lesson to the next bunch of greedy S.O.B.s who think about funding the next group of crooks to come along.
This might be poignant, but at least if I were to murder someone and the news media were reporting on it they would say "...an alleged murderer"... Why can't they say "alleged intellectual property rights" as SCO hasn't proved anything yet and there is still doubt here.
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SCO... An alleged company with an alleged business plan.