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McBride At A Loss For Words
An anonymous reader writes "That, at least is the verdict of Linux Business Week's Maureen O'Gara, who reports that, with all the latest twists and turns, with BayStar and RBC in particular, SCO's CEO was finally bereft of words to describe what it's all been like. In the end he settled for 'This is like...nothing.' As O'Gara herself says, the latest SCO news is plain weird."
SCO now thrive on headlines alone. Stop talking about them and they'll go away quicker.
. . . the latest news is just plain weird . . .
So what is the latest news? BayStar? That's old news.
Smartest thing he's ever done.
"BayStar, the venture capital outfit that wants its money back from SCO - a highly uniquely situation even for the computer business - has suddenly and out of the blue doubled its position in the company."
Bill is not going to give up on this stalking horse.
This could go on forever.
I guess that's the whole freaking idea.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
The SCO/BayStar/RBC deal going bad is like...
When Stalin's and Hitler's alliance collapsed.
Wow... This is probably the most poorly-written article I've read in a long time... Are there any Linux users out there who've taken a journalism class?
I'll try reading this article again when it's posted in English.
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract. So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and won't be able to get its money back. The money of course is paying for SCO's legal pursuits.
So, Baystar's demanding their money back due to breach of contract without telling how the contract was breached means they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
Why does this sound so familiar?
Oh, that's right. SCO claims to own code that was put into Linux, but won't tell what code SCO claims to own.
Is this Darl's way of admitting that SCO doesn't have a legal leg to stand on?
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Would you be proud of your activities after having ruined your corporation's reputation in the business environment? I wonder how the guy sleeps at night.
SCO has no chance of surviving even if they get the
$5 billion by some stroke of insane luck. Who would do business with a company headed up by this overly litigious asshole? "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with," indeed.
Nothing too interesting to see here, folks. In summation: Darl is still a jackass.
One day doesn't really tell much. A more interesting view is the 3 month performance. Then take a look at the 1 year graph, and it looks like SCO is heading right back to where they were before this whole episode began - circling the toilet bowl of history...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
So let me get this straight...BayStar has bought up RBC's investment in SCO and wants SCO to get out of every other business it's in and focus on it's pending lawsuits? Doesn't that strike anybody as odd? Basically, BayStar has told SCO to put all of it's eggs in one basket, hoping that the bottom doesn't fall out. If SCO loses against IBM, then there would be nothing left, the stock would take a pounding (probably become "Penny Stock"), and BayStar loses on it's investment. Strange.
Either BayStar is betting a huge wad of cash on this "horserace" hoping for the big payoff, knows something we don't (which I doubt), or is really stupid. Whatever the management at BayStar is smoking, I'd like some of that.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
SCO has made a major tactical error; they sued Novell alleging slander of title because Novell filed for the copyrights on Unix System V shortly after SCO fled for the same copyrights.
Essentially, to allege a slander of title, you have to come to the court with
1) Evidence that you won the title being slandered,
2) Evidence that the slanderer knew it,
3) and that you suffered damages as part of the slander.
The problem is that SCO not only has failed to show evidence of 1 and 2, Novell is waving the letter around where SCO asked Novell for the copyrights.
Now, if the court dismisses the suit stating that SCO's ownership of the copyrights is in doubt, their case against Autozone collapses, and Red hat can get summary judgement that Linux does not infringe on SCO's copyrights.
Meanwhile IBM's counterclaims, once litigated will leave SCO in bakrupcy and the GPL will have had its day in court (IBM is suing SCO, among other things, for distributing IBM's copyrighted code while violating the terms of the GPL by forbidding the creation of derivative works).
Free/Open Source software has been helped rather than hurt by this lawsuit; it is more famous, and its opponents are displaying themselves to be incompetent bufoons. It has educated many of us about the field of intellectual property law.
See, it's where you place the punctuation. What he's really saying is "This is, like, nothing" meaning that to him and SCO, the Baystar thing doesn't have any affect at all. Or, at least I'm sure that's how SCO will try to spin this...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Baystar are not selling their shares right now - they just doubled their stock by buying the 20,000 shares that the Royal Bank of Canada just cashed out of.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
The previous rises in price were due to the potential earning power of 'taxing' large organisations deploying Linux. Since that's unlikely to happen and their case is looking weaker it is no wonder their shares are falling.
It's not like they sell anything to make a profit.
The 'financial opportunity' in the article refers to BayStar's purchase of $20 million worth of the Royal Bank of Canada's share of SCO at less than the Bank paid for them. Therefore, BayStar is coming out on top in the deal, making it a 'financial opportunity.'
I think the message is a bit more muddled than that if that's what you think the message is.
From the article:
BayStar managing partner Larry Goldfarb [...] wants SCO to drop its remaining Unix business, jettison its current management, husband its resources, focus on pursuing its IP claims and mind its Ps and Qs in what it says publicly.
And, a bit further down:
that despite his disapproval with the way SCO is run he is convinced of the legitimacy of its IP claims and of its winning its case against IBM.
What BayStar wants is not for SCO to drop its lawsuits -- it wants to expand them, if anything. And it wants SCO to drop the irrelevant parts of its business while doing so -- meaning everything but the lawyers.
Problem is, current SCO management doesn't want to do this. Worse yet, the management is criminally incompetent when it comes to knowing when to shut the fuck up and is garnering additional ill will by saying silly things. (Which, in a worst case scenario could be admitted as evidence by the judge -- highly doubtful though).
Anyone that thinks Baystar is a friend to the Linux or OSS crowd is not reading. It's not even legal meanderings -- it's plain English folks! Baystar feels the only "real" business SCO has is in the courts. And that's precisely what we don't want, because it will mean a long, drawn out court fight.
Given all this, we should be cheering for McBride. He's much more likely to cock things up than Baystar is.
The parent poster makes an excellent point. I sometimes wonder about SCO's employees, the ones that actually wrote their software. I wonder how they feel about SCO attacking Linux. It would be pretty weird if one day you came to work and found out that your new CEO has decided to attack other companies using baseless accusations because your funding comes from a parasitical IP company. It's the sorta thing that would make you want to quit -- if you weren't already being laid off because the company didn't need to actually produce anything.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
He may be law abiding (I'm not convinced) but he's trying to take the freedoms of thousands of developers away. You should not let your politics interfere with your sense of judgement. People who wrote their own software have a right to use it unencumbered by the claims of some shady characters who misrepresent their efforts. The SCO CEO has lied about Linux, he has misrepresented his own claims, he has failed to meet the basic requirements of copyright enforcement by intentionally not stating any lines of infringing code, while impugning the character of independent developers. Nobody has stolen his code and the technical merits of his claims are baseless, absurd and unsupportable notions of copyrights on ABIs and derivative works have been introduced in court and in the press to hype their case.
If he has a claim against the community he should state it with specificity, he has never done this. The community should be given the chance to fix any problems (that's a right under the law) and they have never been given that chance.
SCO does not want this. SCO wants to tax us all for work others have done on copyrights they don't even own if Novell is to be believed.
McBride is a despicable man of low character, he has demonstrated this to most rational thinkers and he deserves the public scorn that is heaped upon him.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
I have to say, Rummy is getting too much criticism over this statement. He makes perfect sense.
There are times when you are sure that you don't know something. And since you don't know, you can investigate/research/find out about it.
There are times when you are sure you know something.
And then there are times when you are unaware of something that you should know, and you don't know that you should know it.
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract.
The irony here is just sickening.
May we never see th
I have a lunch box there is a tuna fish sandwich and something spongy in a brown paper wrapper. I like tuna fish, that is a 'known' and i don't have to worry about it.
I don't know what's in the brown paper wrapper but I know better then to eat it. That's a 'known unknown' and since I'm not going to eat it, I don't have to worry about that either.
What I didn't have any idea about, however, was that my lunch box was trapped with a spring loaded poison needle, that's an 'unknown unknown'. Because I didn't have any idea my lunch box could be trapped, I'm dead.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
It doesn't sound to me like he's really at a loss for words. I could be wrong, but to me it seems more like he's trying to downplay things, because he doesn't want people to see this as a "big fight against the big bad linux people" because that's too close to "big fight against the big bad sco people". Darl McBride wants people to see that to him it's just a foregone conclusion that we should all pay him for our copies of linux. I am about to install it on another computer... yet I don't feel any urge to pay up. I guess I'm just as confused as everyone else.
I think this says it all. Business men seldom act out of ethical concerns, they act to make a profit. And it could be argued that McBride's actions have served the shareholder's best interest by allowing SCO to continue operating with a major influx from venture capitalists and Microsoft and others. It could also be argued that without these actions SCO's employees would have been out of work last year. Now I'm not going to say that this man's actions over the past year have not be anything less then contemptable. I rather thought that this form of behavier went out of fashion in the 1980s, but clearly the ME approach to business is still going strong.