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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."
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
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?
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?"
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
Or he can claim that someone else took his words and are using them in an open forum while infringing on licenses in the process of doing so.
"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
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.
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
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".
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
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
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.
A great plot with the SCO stock price plotted over Ululu/Ayer's Rock is here.
Original post with this plot is here.
"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.
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.
That reminds me of the scene in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Arthur Dent manages to get the entire crew out of some tricky situation by finding the right button to activate the improbabilty drive.
Asked by Zaphod Beeblebrox if he was responsible, Arthur replies "Oh, it was nothing". The entire crew take his statement literally and continue on with their previous conversation; much to Arthur's annoyance.
Perhaps Darl's wearing his DuoGenta, Superchromatic, Pyro-sensitive sunglasses, which have just turned black.