Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe he shouldn't have used them all up before.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
he was referring to how much his stock will be worth.
no no ... see, he was refering to what SCO has based their case on
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Thats like.... woah
FP?
This sig no verb.
SCO now thrive on headlines alone. Stop talking about them and they'll go away quicker.
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.'
McBride then followed-up: "But at least I'm not 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld,"
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
It's obvious Darl was describing the value of his company.
'This is like...nothing.'
I don't suppose he was looking at the SCOX share price when he said it?
Smartest thing he's ever done.
So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on
Brought to you by the words "Shoe", "Other" and "Foot".
As if all that weren't enough, I've tried to bring you people gold, and getting my home IP banned from Slashdot was my only thanks.
This will be my last post to Slashdot as Mr. Darl McBride. Mod it up or mod it down, I don't much care anymore. I'm going back to my simple ranch hand ways while Boies and Sontag round up the rest of whatever's left for our ginormous IP firesale, if there's even anything there to capitalize on anymore.
Thanks to those of you who have moderated me up in the past, those of you who took the time for pithy and cute replies even if you didn't like me, and those who lightened up enough to have a laugh instead of freaking. It's been like... like... it's been like nothing else.
~Darl
the site seems to be slowing, but not dead yet. here's the text:
SCO CEO Darl McBride, the most hated man in the computer industry, says he's reached for an analogy to describe SCO's experience since suing IBM. "This is like...," he's said to himself, groping for an elucidating comparison, only to conclude, "Nothing...Nothing compares to what's happened in the last year."
What happened in the last few days proves his point.
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.
The Royal Bank of Canada, which BayStar brought into the $50 million investment the pair made in SCO last fall, the investor that has reportedly never expressed doubts about the strength of SCO's position or, unlike BayStar, has never complained to SCO about its behavior, sold $20 million worth of its SCO shares to BayStar.
And the bank is converting the rest of its preferred stock - that it paid $10 million for - into 740,740 shares of SCO common presumably to dump it on the public market. Presumably too it won't sell the stock immediately since the conversion cost it $13.50 a share, more than double what SCO's been selling for.
BayStar and the bank's $50 million represented 17.5% of SCO.
Neither BayStar nor the Canadian bank will discuss what happened. The bank merely calls its action a "business decision" and BayStar claims it was presented with "a strategic and financial opportunity."
McBride claims he doesn't know any more than we do. He's had barely any contact with the bank and all he knows is that he got a letter from them last Wednesday outlining what it was doing, but not explaining why.
McBride also claims that he doesn't know what BayStar's about either.
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.
McBride said he didn't know how buying the bank's shares would strengthen BayStar's position. BayStar, for instance, doesn't have a seat on SCO's board and the shares it owns are non-voting stock.
Presumably, the shares that the Canopy Group owns - and remember, Canopy got close to $300 million out of Microsoft to settle an antitrust suit - would trump any notions BayStar might harbor about a hostile takeover.
BayStar managing partner Larry Goldfarb, the guy responsible for the firm's investment in SCO, told the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that he 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.
Apparently BayStar's lawyers have been saying the same thing to SCO's lawyers.
One wonders whether Goldfarb taking the Times into his confidence made the bank lose its confidence in its investment, hold BayStar responsible and demand that BayStar buy it out.
BayStar's comment about buying the bank's shares being a "financial opportunity" hints that BayStar paid less for them than the bank did.
Goldfarb told the Times and his PR guy told us - Goldfarb was reportedly out of the country when the news broke and couldn't speak for himself - 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.
According to BayStar's Web site, Burst.com is part of its portfolio. It's unclear what the VC's position is, but Burst is the company, reduced to one or two people, that's suing Microsoft for a tidy packet. It's one of the private antitrust suits that Microsoft has yet to settle.
Burst claims Microsoft, which it collaborated with for two years, ripped off a media transmission technology it designed to send video and audio files electronically and stuck it in Media Player 9.
Burst has no other business outside its suit and evidently is the model BayStar wants SCO to emulate.
funny, that's what my acountant said when I asked about the money I had left after investing in SCO.
I work at another Canadian bank, but can confirm that some of my contacts (ex-colleague of mine, actually) in the IT section of RBC are *very* happy with the investment banking's decision to pull out of SCO. For once it appears like the right hand knows what the left hand is doing... their IT department has a few linux pilot projects (one including desktop replacement!) which suggest a conflict of interest internally.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
SCO CEO Darl McBride was quoted commenting on their current case against IBM as "This is like...nothing."
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
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
"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."
That's right, Darl, and don't you just hate it when someone accuses you of doing something wrong but refuses to tell you precisely what?
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, 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.
I've seen at least 10 of the same jokes in these first 30 comments about what McBride "really" meant. Okay, we get it. You're trying to get a Funny. Darl must have been referring to the basis for his case, or his stock quote. Haha.
Now, no more, please?
I guess we have the next part for Keanu Reeves to play. It's at about his intelligence level too.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I can't read that article, the site is too painful to look at. That orange and black checkered background strobes violently when the pages is scrolled on a flat panel screen. It's like watching Pokemon with one eye while someone rubs salt in the other.
Interesting though, two of the embedded ads were error pages from IIS. "Too many users are accessing the site at this time" or something. Clearly, whoever is advertising on linuxworld.com is a true believer.
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
... 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.
Proposed titles for the book includes:
Gates of the Hell!
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
He was going to say "This is like that bank heist in Illinois that went wrong, we had to shoot our way out.", but realized he was talking to the press and not his buddies at Canopy and managed to stop himself just in time with "This is like... nothing".
Nothing too interesting to see here, folks. In summation: Darl is still a jackass.
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
The Royal Bank of Canada, which BayStar brought into the $50 million investment the pair made in SCO last fall, the investor that has reportedly never expressed doubts about the strength of SCO's position or, unlike BayStar, has never complained to SCO about its behavior, sold $20 million worth of its SCO shares to BayStar.
That has to be one of the worst sentences I've read in a news article. I know it's still gramatically correct, but talk about hard to follow! Sure it may be off-topic, but WOW! It looks as if anyone can be a writer these days.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
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
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.
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.
--Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Next Day
I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think... and I assume it's what I said
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.
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..
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.
A great plot with the SCO stock price plotted over Ululu/Ayer's Rock is here.
Original post with this plot is here.
Typically, once an arsonist starts a fire, they leave the building rather than watch it burn down around them.
SCO seems to be running around locking all the doors, and they're the only ones in the building.
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.
Yes but Baystar is not buying the currently-$5-and-dropping publicly traded shares. Baystar is buying 20,000 Series A shares worth $1000 each. Now the interesting part is that if SCO is forced to redeem these special stocks, Baystar gets considerably more than the $1000 per share because of the penalty clause - I think it's a 20% premium, so make that $1200 per share. So Baystar is unlikely to be out of cash if SCO is forced to re-imburse it. In fact Baystar will be up $8 million dollars on their holding of 40,000 Series A shares.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
McBride claims he doesn't know any more than we do. He's had barely any contact with the bank and all he knows is that he got a letter from them last Wednesday outlining what it was doing, but not explaining why.
McBride also claims that he doesn't know what BayStar's about either.
You gotta wonder what this guy does all day in his office. I'm thinking he's the member of an uber guild on Everquest with a level 65 rogue totally decked out in planar armor.
From the article: "And the bank is converting the rest of its preferred stock - that it paid $10 million for - into 740,740 shares of SCO common presumably to dump it on the public market. Presumably too it won't sell the stock immediately since the conversion cost it $13.50 a share, more than double what SCO's been selling for."
Always good to see quality journalism. That $13.50 is per share of *preferred stock,* which originally sold for $1000.
Here's the math:
They're cashing out 10,000 shares of preferred for 740,740 shares of regular. Regular is 5.16 now, which is about what it would be worth at conversion - bringing them $3,822,218. This also means their shares of preferred stock are worth $3822/share right now. It will cost $13.50/*preferred* share - not common share as claimed by the article - to convert the 10,000 shares. This amounts to a 3.5% loss on the conversion, but that looks golden right now. It certainly would have made no sense if the $13.50 were per common share, as the article mistakenly claimed. In other words, they didn't pay a $13.50 fee to sell a $5 stock.
Also of interest - the purchase price of the stock was $10,000,000. Given the return of $3.8M, that means that they bought their stock at a price equivalent to $13.57/share of common stock. Probably looked good at one time...to someone.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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
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...
Roberts S. McNamara was Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, and largely responsible for the quagmire that the Vietnam War became. (After avoiding responsibility for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and untold thousands or millions of Vietnamese, McNamara was rewarded with the Presidency of The World Bank for twelve years.)
Donald Rumsfeld, of course, is the current Secretary of Defense who decided to ignore military doctrine and top Pentagon generals and top military lawyers in favor of his own ideas on war doctrine and the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.
Here's what one retired officer (an officer right-wing enough to have compared Howard Dean to Hitler, but also an excellent novelist), Ralph Peters, had to say about Rumsfeld today (emphasis mine):
So I've decided that it's only fair to remind ourselves of our "proud" history of quagmires, by referring to the Secretary of Defense as 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
"In other news, SCO CEO Darl McBride was named as the leading candidate to fill the job of Iraqi Information Minister, recently vacated by Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf."
thats why he's at a loss for words. other people have been stealing words from him!
other peoples sentences are just his words rearranged in a different order. they are obviously DERIVATIVE WORKS of his sentences. some sentences have had the words purposely REARRANGED to OBFUSCATE the true origin of the sentence - Darl. in fact, sometimes the senteneces other people have said are EXACTLY THE SAME are Darl's sentences. word for word. coincidence?
a bunch of MIT rocket scientists have confirmed that Darl's sentence "yes." has been used elsewhere MILLIONS of times. this is STEALING of his IP and it must stop. sue Darl sue!
hint to Darl: when you sue remember that (like with the IBM lawsuit) you can pick whatever value you want for damages! rather than sue for an obscenely ridiculous value like 5 Billion dollars you should really go all out this time and sue for 100 GaZillion (GaZillion - copyright Darl McBride) dollars! just think how that will make the stock price in your stock scam to go up. wow! is our legal system cool or what?
it basically says "there's nothing to say about anything."
Sounds like a Seinfeld Episode to me.
What?
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