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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."
The seem ripe for an SEC investigation. How many shady share trades can they go through before someone looks at it?
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Just wondering what a slashdotting of this stock might look like
I mean everybody on /. shorting this stuff..
..should be interesting..
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
And there's the bottom-line. Don't produce anything worthwhile and use your <ahem> IP to generate revenue via lawsuits. As if we didn't know ....
Still, the 'jettison management' bit has to have Darl sitting on the edge of his seat!
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
A little offtopic, but has anyone noticed that the advert server for this site is having trouble servicing the slashdotting that Linuxworld is taking?
This sig no verb.
Baystar must think the same. Otherwise, why call selling stock at a loss a 'financial opportunity'?
It is an opportunity, if you realize it is insanely overpriced right now, and will only go down in the future. Never mind that you are going to loose money by selling the stock at a lower price than you bought it for; they are selling it at the highest price it will ever be in the future. This is their best opportunity to minimize their losses.
The backers are getting out. Watch SCO burn...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
... is BayStar, who seems to be much more interested in funding IP lawsuits than in Real Business.
I thought "Wow, the stockholders have woken up!" when I first read about the whole BayStar thing.
But fact is, BayStar has issues with SCO because the former is saying "Dump all your staff, minimize expenses, and just sue, sue, sue." and the latter isn't totally complying - so BayStar is taking their ball and going home.
The fuckwits.
Yeah, but it is getting all them from the bank that they financed to buy stock in SCO originally, which is selling off all their stock.
SCO won't see any of this money. It just keeps the bottom from dropping out of their stock price a little longer...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
McBride is at a Loss for Words
Maybe he shouldn't have used them all up before.
This is probably a good thing. In fact, as it presently stands Darl could teach a thing or two about not running your mouth off unnecessarily to a certain other proprietary Unix company.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
I think Baystar wants to keep SCO low profile and is telling McBride to shut his mouth because if more people were aware of their parasitical business model, I think it would hurt them financially and they might suffer some backlash from the public at large. As it stands now, probably only the IT community, and maybe just a subset of that, is aware of the implications of this lawsuit.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Who cares. There is absolutely no news or anything of interest in this article.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
From the Article:
"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."
hasent this been what SCO is doing to IBM - Not telling them anything..
"Horserace" is my guess.
:)
Think of this situation as the mirror of an Angel Investor with an up and coming company. The Angel might invest in 10 startups and have 9 of them die before going public and yet still make a fortune.
In this case, if they can buy 10 failing companies $100M each, each having a $1B+ lawsuit in process, only 1 of those guys has to win their lawsuit for BayStar to make their money back and then some.
What is the best chance that BayStar has for SCO to win? SCO has to focus EVERYTHING on winning (even though by doing so they almost certainly will disappear after the win anyway).
Perhaps this should be the defition of a "Devil Investor"?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if SCO hinted that they would do just this, but they probably din't -commit- to it.
Of course we all know that some times 10 companies out of 10 fail, so BayStar could screw themselves out of the cash, which is why they put pressure on their investments to do the burn-out legislation in an all-out attempt to win.
And I'm with you, I would smoke hundreds of millions of dollars if someone gave me billions to do so
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Going away quick is the _last_ thing the Linux community should want.
A chance to test the GPL with Darl "i've got... like nothing" McBride vs. IBM is the best thing that could ever happen to Open Source software in a business environment.
This is the best chance to give GPL software some business credibility that there ever was.
There for awhile, SCO was a pretty darn good engine for anti-Linux FUD. And it's pretty clear that was the specific intent of all of Darl's motormouth behavior. But that strategy has by now completely played itself out.
Now, the absolute WORST thing that could happen in that regard is for any of the court cases to wrap themselves up. If your goal is anti-Linux FUD, a wrap up of any of the suits would appear as a Linux stamp of approval and send it off running.
So the question is, after attempting every stalling tactic in the book, what effect would a change in ownership of the IP at the center of the court cases have on the cases themselves? And is Baystar in a position to facilitate just such a change of ownership?
Guess we'll know pretty soon...
Just a hypothesis, but perhaps BayStar's job is to get SCO to liquidate all employees and make it easy for M$oft to buy out the rights if they hold up against Novell. BayStar does all the dirty work, and then M$oft gets to buy the IP and put it's big lawyers against IBM's big lawyers.
If the IP doesn't work, BayStar has probably been assured that M$oft will reimburse them for any losses through a lucrative investment deal down the road. They DO have over a billion in the bank after all. $50 mill is pocket change.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
What's next? SHOCKER: McBride blows his nose!! I know there's a weekly SCO quota on slashdot, but can we keep it to the vaguely significant stories please?
we all know that RBC took a bath on the shares they converted at 13.50 per, (a loss of ?60? percent) but we do NOT know at what price they sold their premium 20k shares to baystar at.
if baystar made guarantees to RBC before the inital purchase of the 30 mill$us of stock, it's very possible, they sold their 20k shares for the amount they lost on the conversion, and no one is talking about it.
do you know, does anyone, that they sold their 20 million dollar investment for more or less than 20 million.. we have all posted the assumption, they sold them to baystar for less than face value.
maybe baystar paid off RBC for a loan they finagled....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random