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SCO and Baystar Strike a Deal
comforteagle writes "As you'll no doubt recall, SCO financier wanted to cash-in on its stock because of how SCO was being run. It appears they've struck a deal. 'The SCO Group, Inc. today announced it has entered into an agreement with BayStar Capital II LP to repurchase and retire all 40,000 shares of Series A-1 Convertible Preferred Stock currently held by BayStar.'" Summary: Baystar and the Royal Bank of Canada invested $50 million in SCO in October 2003. In 6 1/2 months, they've now converted their investment to $13 million in cash and $13.7 million of common stock, for a loss of almost half their investment.
In 6 1/2 months, they've now converted their investment to $13 million in cash and $13.7 million of common stock, for a loss of almost half their investment.
Nelson: Ha ha!
Seriously though. This should be a lesson to VC funds and financing operations that finance companies whose business models are built upon legal action and sucking off the hard work and sweat of people who make ideas work through the creation of products that improve our lives. These companies based on litigious action are typically fairly sleazy operations and will not generate any "good will" for the financing operations or companies.
I personally would much rather support and fund (and yes, even make money from) companies who are out there to make a difference. Work to make something new or make a difference rather than prostituting yourself for mere money and parasitizing off of others hard work and insight.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Might as well have bought a bond.
Since it's SCO, it would have been a junk bond.
Does this mean that SCO is broke?
Unknown host pong.
1) Start up a private investment company 2) Invest $50,000,000 in SCO 3) ??? 4) Prof.. wait, I think I'm doing this wrong
Getting some of their money is better than losing it all when sco gets their ass handed to them.
Next time I would suggest in doing more research...
One of the finest examples of real world karma in action..:)
26M$ is still much better then what it would be in four to eight weeks time
Well, the good news is, RBC and Baystar are giving all of their employees a year's supply of SCO brand toilet paper for free. Two-ply.
Even the rats that funded this FUD operation see the handwriting on the wall. Half their cash is better than none....
Obviously this requires they case is decided before they are totally broke. A big if, but looking better every day.
Thirdly we will have a clear wipeout of SCO. If they went bust before the fat lady sings this could still leave some doubt (FUD residue) about the GPL etc.
Help fight continental drift.
This is really going to hurt SCO, really going to put a large dent in their legal warchest. Let's say SCO does run out of money and they are forced to drop their suits...what happens when someone else purchases their "patents" and starts the whole thing over again (hi, Microsoft)? I'd almost rather SCO see this to the end, as it appears that they have a penchant for shooting themselves in the foot.
Their (even bigger) loss.
AC comments get piped to
I suppose we won't be seeing any Baystar 3 step plans to profit jokes with this story.
SCO let them run Linux without having to pay that licensing fee.
Best Windows Freeware
I would call this poetic justice, but since we all know the money came from microsoft originally. A loss of about 24 million dollars is nothing to them.
What is really sad here is that people who could do something about activities like this Baystar/SCO/Linux/Microsoft/Sun/IBM/etc debacle don't care.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
Baystar and the Royal Bank of Canada investment:
$ 50 million.
Money lost on investing in SCO:
$ 23.3 million.
Poetic humiliation and embarrassment as payback for all the SCO's actions against Linux Users:
Priceless.
First, start with a large fortune . . . . . .
Baystar had better dump that common stock right away. The price fell more than 7% today alone, and I can't imagine how bad its going to tank on the 10th, when SCO has to announce its earnings (the call got pushed back from tomorrow so they can have time to properly prepare their FUD). This will have to put a serious dent in their legal budget, and combined with the inevitable fall in stock price and decreasing revenues, I think the end for them might be very close.
Could there have been another call to a certain Redmond number? Of course there will be denials, we expect them by now, so it's pretty murky where the truth is, but it doesn't seem SCO can afford this kind of buy-back, alone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Quoth the article:
Now if they're so happy, why are they buying their shares back?
A fool and his financiers are soon parted.
It's been fun watching the SCOX hover around the $5 mark. I only hope they stay alive long enough for IBM and Redhat to be able to drive the stake through their undead hearts.
Now for the REAL question - with evidence that Microsoft was behind the feeding of SCO, will the DoJ find the balls to actually investigate? Perhaps if the SEC launches action against the SCOzos...
Would this be seen as profit for SCO? I'd hate to see them have more funding for the FUD campaign from hell.
My personality is like a coupon, it's 10% off.
Baystar investment managers have left Baystar "to pursue other opportunities." These include, running technology funds for Mutual Fund companies!
Gotta love the way the ol boy network functions in the financial sector. Just give your classmate from Yale a call, and boom - you are off to lose more money for other people...
Financial analysts need permanent records. I need to be able to Google the guy running a fund, and have it say "this moron thought SCO was a good idea in 2003."
Daryl (to self): Our stock is like a stream of bat piss.
Investor (in alarm): What did you say?!!
Daryl (was that outloud?): What I said was
The price fell more than 7% today alone, and I can't imagine how bad its going to tank on the 10th
hehe.. and when they do, I can't imagine what's gonna happen to SCO's stock when Baystar liquidates...
All I can imagine is Darl McBride looking up and asking "what's that whistling sound?" right before he gets hit by 2 million shares.
will not pay the bills. I do not trust the entire banking/investing community any more at all, I think we'd be better off NOT having these so-called "investor class" sucking off the hard work of everybody else. Bunch of parasites that need to get back to work.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Any takers?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
This reminds me alot of Junk Bond trading from what I remember of reading in the newspapers (remember those things...newspapers that is...well, soon SCO too) at the time.
With what the remainder of the stock is selling for now and considering outside held debt, this would not be a good time to invest in SCO
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
At closing today, it's lower than it was a few days ago...yet it's STILL above the $3/share it was a little over a year ago. !?!?!?! Why is that?
Good point. Lots of posts about BayStar / RBC getting less than half of their investment back, but how much less is changing rapidly. What do you bet that over the next week or two, SCO drops below $3?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Right. That SCO loss was bad, but the $56.23 in your checking account walking away? Heads rolled over that one.
Come on, it may be posted by an AC, but its got to be the funniest thing on this page..
When an investor such as Baystar does one of these convertible preferred deals, they can do something called "shorting against the convert".
... I can't be arsed to hit Yahoo Finance right now). Well, Baystar can sell shares at $15. They can sell shares that they don't even own ... that is called "short selling", and is a normal transaction on the stock market.
... if you've got a convertible ... you just pull out the convertible preferred shares and convert them, in order to have shares.
Here's how it works. At the time Baystar bought their convertible preferred shares, SCOX was trading at about $15 (roughly
You start with 0 shares, you sell (say) 10,000 shares at $15, now you have $150,000 cash and a position of -10,000 shares SCOX. (That's right, negative numbers!) Later, you buy those 10,000 shares back at $5 per share, leaving you with $100,000 profit and 0 shares of SCOX.
What if you short at $15 and the stock goes to $25? Then you lose $10 per share on every share that you shorted. Except
I'm not saying Baystar did this, but it's a common strategy for holders of convertibles. A convertible is really just a bond + a call option, and shorting against a call option is a common strategy.
In other words, you guys are laughing that Baystar is stuck with a bunch of $5 SCOX shares, but Baystar may have already sold them a few months ago at $15 or $20. They'll just use these conversion shares to deliver back on the shares that they borrowed+sold at $15 to $20.
... on how long it takes Baystar to come out and say that SCO is talking shit and something much, much worse is happening from SCO's end than they're letting on to. Like Baystar starting a lawsuit or something.
Seriously... I wouldn't put it past them.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
for a loss of almost half their investment
Hey, it's SCO - that's not bad at all!
That's precisely what they are doing here. Getting back what cash they can, getting a bunch of shares they can slow-dump back to the market, and not fighting a big, messy legal battle to get their 50 million back. Of course, SCO doesn't have 50 million in cash to give them and it would effectively shut SCO down, or force other fairly dire measures on them to get together 50 million bucks and still have operating capital - while Baystar itself may not give a crap, it would look quite bad for them to screw over a company they had invested in that badly.
So I guess we are left to wonder why Baystar bought into this deal in the first place. I have no idea, and I know there are lots of sinister motives assigned to this, but I'm sure some of the characters involved just got suckered into what sounded to them like a sure-fire legal get-rich-quick scheme - which is all that SCO's business is at this point.
I hope you're not a stockbroker - the link you have given is for the Speedus Corporation. Try looking at The SCO Group.
According to this site, the changes in the stock price have been: (-57.4% - last 3 months, -70.0% - last 6 months, -22.5% - last 12 months)
And analysts still recommend it as a "strong buy".
By coincidence, their stock dropped twenty-five cents at about fifteen minutes to market close - when the story was posted on the PR newswire. Check the headlines link for today for that timestamp.
This sig no verb.
I *hate* may father. He spent the first 18 years of my life making it pure Hell. He spent the next 10 years trying to do the same. So when he came to me a few weeks ago to ask advice on "high-tech" companies to invest in, well, I gave him a "choice" recomendation.
Is it just me or does SCO's need for venture capital to fund it's IP litigation remind anyone else of one of those Nigerian 419 scams?
Think about it, someone (SCO) has a line on a lot of money in the Nigerian central bank encumbered by some sort of red tape (IBM, Novell and basically every Linux user on the planet think SCO is full of hot air). They just need some cash up front in order to get it out (have to hire a bunch of soulless IP lawyers). If you are willing to front them them some money (invest in SCO) you'll get a phenomenal rate of return when the money is freed up (SCO wins their suit, or pigs fly, whichever comes first).
The parallels are striking. Poor Baystar, they got taken by one of the oldest ones in the book.
The rest is in very iffy common stock, which they cant sell in any kind of volume without reducing its value to nearly nil.
Now can the damn stock please crater?
Just wait till June 10th. They're giving their report. It very well could tank that day.
"Series A-1 Convertible Preferred Stock" would be an awesome name for a car
Sad but so very true. Wonder how these BayStar guys found investors in their fund in the first place. Here's to hoping they put the heat on BayStar for irresponsible handling of their money.
When there's a loss of this size it wouldn't suprise me if someone got a really sweet deal along the way on the back of Royal Bank shares holders.
Better check the lead bank brokers offshore account.
The fact that you think investors merely "suck off the hard work" of other people shows how little you (and most people) grasp economics. Without investment capital, many ideas cannot get off the ground; VC firms lose money all the time as they invest in new ideas.
The upshot of this is that people get the opportunity to try new things even if they can't afford to take the risk personally -- this actually feeds money into the economy, creates jobs, &c.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
It says in the article that they can't sell more than 10% of it in any single day.
#!
Start as a Billionaire
Help fight continental drift.
as to why CEO Darl McBribe (McBride).. obviously is going ahead with his spiteful Unix licensing bullshit..
on top of that though, I was wondering why he was so nervous and dodging questions during the face to face interview with CNet's Dan Farber..
got to hand it to these assholes when it comes to them going by their "any means necessary" strategy to getting the green stuff rolling in..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
I do not trust the entire banking/investing community any more at all
You mean you used to trust them? Sucker!
You know the joke about the whole SubGenius thing..."If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
Here is a prime example of why we are all SubGenii. We all knew that SCO would tank. We had a golden opportunity to make some serious cash. And you know what? I'll betcha not a single person on all of Slashdot cashed in on these fools. Damn.
It's not often you have a sure thing in a horse race. And I just missed mine. Double damn.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Can we stage a hostile takeover and fire Darl? I'd kick in $20...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From the PR:
If Baystar is lucky, right now that's about 250,000 shares a day average, or 25,000 shares a day that they can sell.But, let's assume that they can get the sales up to 500,000 shares a day average, letting them sell 50,000 a day. With 2,846,004 shares to be sold, that means that Baystar, if they sold every day, would need 57 market days (about 11 1/2 weeks) to sell out... with 25,000 a day, you of course double that. This means that, if they could start selling next Monday, Baystar would be out of the stock around the First of September (around Thanksgiving if they sell at 25,000/day)
Poor Baystar....
NOT!
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
While I'd rather not get into politics, but recall when the Bush administration took over, the DoJ ended the antitrust prosecution against Microsoft. I doubt that the government will be motivated to look into the matter.
Now SCO has $13 million LESS to harass people with. This shortens their lifespan considerably.
Not to mention, they are unlikely to get ANY further investment...
I think, with the inevitability of certain doom, even imminent, Canopy does what Canopy does best:
Funnel the remaining cash into their own pockets and lets the SCaldera shell die.
This is what they've done time and time again. Think Caldera got the money from their DR-DOS lawsuit?
Nope. Canopy did. They formed a new Caldera corp, moved it's operations there and continued the lawsuit with the shell of the original corp.
Anyone investing in SCaldera should remember that...
Corporatism != Free Market
"plumb it in price" should be "plummet in price", but the image of a plumb line dropping straight down is quite rich, so you may well communicate more with your incorrect phrase than you would have by using the correct one.
This must be the saddest story we've read here in a long time. An honest company with honest intentions attracts a capital injection from a investment firm looking to invest in companies with a bright future. A match made in heaven. :-)
Lucky Baystar comes out with some cash. The other SCO shareholders will just have to scramble for what they can on the sharemarket before the company sinks without a trace.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
damn, just when i want some REASONED analysis of this, groklaw is having php grumbles...
Nothing - well thats something.
There's an interesting interview with Darl at The SCO 2004 forum
Darl: I was trying to explain this to my father the other day. We grew up on a ranch, and he was asking the question "What was up with all the lawsuits - sounds very complicated?"
"Well, it's quite simple, it's like our days growing up on the ranch If you took the cattle up on the mountains in the Summer-time, and in the fall, you went to round them up, you had to bring the cattle back in, and whenever they had a brand on their side, you could establish which brands were yours. In the meantime, if somebody came and took your cattle, you had the rights to go track them down. When I was growing up we had a case very similar to this. Someone stole our cattle, we went and found our brands. The Brand inspector helped us get restoration of those cows back to us, and we were whole again with our property. That's exactly what's going here. Copyrights of software are very similar to brands on cattle. And what we're doing is we've found that the copyright [works] we have here have made their way into other properties. We're in the process of rounding these up, and once we have them rounded up, then we will feel that we have restitution and justice, for our intellectual properties demands that we have out there."
Well, if he'd tell us what his brand looked like, we could return the lines of source code to him. Unfortunately, until we know what his brand looks like, these could be the stolen lines of SCO UNIX for all we know:
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
See:
. as p
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1605475,00
Steven
And analysts still recommend it as a "strong buy".
Actually they don't. Only Deutsche Bank feels that way. And the analyst who formed that opinion, Brian Skiba, doesn't work there anymore. Interesting.
its a microsoft site, dont you think they would be biased?
I would like to invest my beer gut into SCO. Then in 6 months I have only 1/2 a beer gut. Sounds good to me. Lou Sir
That means that Microsoft now owes Baystar something in excess of $50 million - $13 million = $37 million and $50 million - $26.7 million = $23.3 million.
The former is more realistic, and Baystar execs deserve something for their willingness to play the fool. So, in the next year or two look for Microsoft to do something that'll net Baystar a quick and easy $50 million in profit.
Am I being cynical or conspiratorial? I think not. Just realistic.
Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle
If they're talking Canadian dollars, that 6-1/2 million dollar loss is like, what, $847 USD?
Baystar only put in $20Mil originally. RBC put in the other $30 Mil. I'm figuring they probably paid RBC 7-8Million for the their 20,000 shares. So you figure they have about $28 Million. They get 13 cash and 2.1 Million shares(currently at $4.80) for another 8 Million. If they were smart(they are) they have been shorting SCO for some time(probably shortly after the deal was done) around the $15-20 stage. They will at the very least break even, but Im thinking they will actually make a very modest profit in the area of 3-5 Million. All that aside, I am sure even if they were to take a small loss, they are very happy not to have lost their shirts. They were sweating, the more they read on the case, the worse things looked. They talked about SCO dropping UNIX entirely and focusing on the IP. I think someone must have lifted the sheet and revealed the fine turd they had bought;-)
I would never advocate violence and torture, but the first thing that occured to me when I read this is brand Darl!. Perhaps the Microsoft logo tatooed onto one of his ass cheeks. Then he can remember who 0wns his ass.
And Darl (and bodyguards), this is satire, not a suggestion that anyone violate your ass.
Crude, I know. Sorry. Back to more mature discussions...
Is Darl going to be able to start shooting off his mouth again? Will we get a new laugh every few days as he makes outrageous claims, sues more people, contradicts himself publicly, etc.
I just can't wait. Perhaps they'll sue the penguin lovers society first, followed by 'all programmers', then on to some bizarre victims of their wrath.
Without investment capital, many ideas cannot get off the ground; VC firms lose money all the time as they invest in new ideas.
And people like you forget that the economy is a myth- a shared myth, but still a myth. If we actually WANTED to advance as a race instead of just make money, we wouldn't put mythological obstacles in people's way trying to get new ideas off the ground in the first place. There SHOULD be no risk in new ideas at all; and if we had an economic system more like the one demanded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Robotic Nation then we wouldn't need the venture capitalists or investors at all. Just survive on wellfare until your idea gets off the ground.
But no- redesigning the economic system for maximum efficiency would be stupid, wouldn't it?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
At one point in my life, before the death of three companies that tried to go public only to get all long term R&D money yanked away in pursuit of the three-month bottom line, I actually played around with being a conservative. It went so far that I voted for Bush in 2000- BIGGEST MISTAKE OF MY LIFE. Within a year I had been pushed out of private industry alltogether- and it was 26 months before I finally landed a job with government. There is no good left in capitalism- it's broken to the point that long term research or even short term breakthroughs have become impossible. And we wonder why the computer revolution has hit a plateau.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
remember: this is not a business investment. it's a third-party-funded smear campaign against Free software. there's plenty of money available to keep this going, and to keep all the players happy.
dance, puppets - dance on your strings.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
SCO re-scheduled the earnings call for June 10. This is one day after the hearing on Daimler-Chrysler's motion to dismiss. Perchance SCO wants to have an early opportunity to spin the results of the hearing?
you should be rejoicing in situation where SCO gets royally fucked. Feel free to mod me down now.
Then, SCO gives them back US$13 mill + 13 mill of monopoly dollars. They make a nice profit, just by keeping their mouth close and telling how good SCO is doing, and they even promise to keep the monopoly dollars, aka SCO stocks, to please the market. The anon. big investor label the US$40 mill as a Marketing item, corresponding to 0.1% of their total budget, and everyone is happy.
Maybe those analysts want people to buy it so that they can sell it.
Here is a prime example of why we are all SubGenii. We all knew that SCO would tank. We had a golden opportunity to make some serious cash. And you know what? I'll betcha not a single person on all of Slashdot cashed in on these fools. Damn.
This is a bit of bragging I guess but I shorted a few hundred shares from just under $14 down to just under $6. (you can find old posts of mine where I suggest shorting SCOX here on slashdot) Didn't make a fortune because I didn't have enough cash to short a huge amount (grad school) but it basically paid for my next computer. Thanks SCOX!
I've had a bit of luck in the past with "story stocks" like this one. Corel a few years back when they were getting into linux. I've had my eye on Rambus (to short) and Novell (to long) recently. I would have done Novell a few months back but ironically my money was tied up in SCOX. When a small company like these gets sufficent buzz the stock can do some pretty spectacular things regardless of the underlying fundamentals. Not stuff for the faint of heart but when you get it right...
You can buy an option to insure that a short doesn't eat your lunch. I would have shorted the stock, but the options were sold out.
No offense but I doubt that is the reason. There are no options publicly traded on SCOX. Wish that there were, I could have made a killing.
It's already been done before. Quite funny and worth a read.
I know, the law is never a good way to go....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
We as a society can't afford to fund every idea and possible invention out there. We need people whose job (full or part time) it is to allocate capital and resources to the most deserving projects. Those that have the highest chance of success. Those people are called investors. Granted they don't make perfect decisions, however, if you could do a better job you'd be rich and you could decide which projects to fund.
The man who invests his money and attempts to create further value for society is to be commended over the man who gluttonously consumes his wealth.
I'll give you an example. Two brothers, Bob and Joe, have become very wealthy hockey players. Bob pisses away his money. He buys expensive cars, has statues erected and lives the high life. Many people are employed and jobs are created to provide the expensive items he is buying. However, these items are quickly consumed and there is no lasting benefit to society.
Joe invests his money in a telecommunications company. Using investor's money the company is able to fund research into high-speed data transfer methods. Money that Joe made from his hockey career is now paying for this research. Jobs are created, total knowledge of society is increased and society (consumers/businesses) receive better products and technology. This is the magic of our free markets.
We need more Joes and fewer Bobs.
- All your stock are belong to us
bash: rtfm: command not found
There must be some other reason, maybe they didn't want to talk about the Baystar deal. They got ahead on a profit basis, but it was done at the expense of the shareholders and their cash position fell by $13M.
Additionally it is probably hard to answer question about Why Baystar bailed and "How are you going to get more cash?"
Help fight continental drift.
... can you imagine that I am shareholder of these bastards?
That is exactly what I was thinking.
Where you went wrong was capitalizing the word "REASONED". Taken at face value your post just suggests that Pamela's site covers SCO issues better. But because you emphasized that word, it implied that poeple on Slashdot can be unreasonable when it comes to SCO, and for that you must be die.
The fact that Pamela's site does cover SCO better, and tends to contain more REASONABLE analysis than Slashdot is beside the point of course.
How dare you suggest that it might be nice to hear what Groklaw has to say about this turn of events!? The status of Groklaw, the best source for SCO news, is obviously a totally different topic from this story about the latest SCO news!
A percentage of your bank account balance is used to finance others' debts and, as a consequence, the bank earns a return through interest on those debts and other investments to help keep your checking account "free," amoung other things. Of course, not all of it is lent out; people still need to withdraw cash and write checks to other banks on a continuous basis. It is enough, however, that if most or all of a bank's customers decided to withdraw all of their money at the same time, the bank would be totally doomed (a "run" on the bank).
;-).
So, banks actually want both your money and your debt
1. More bank accounts and more deposits (especially direct-deposit, where the banks can better-predict future income)
2. Greater capability to lend more money
3. More interest income
4. Teh Profit!! $$$$ More bars of gold-pressed latinum
5. Rinse and repeat
It's like being a bookie... You don't guarantee a win on any given move, but you play them off against each other until you have a win either way. You need to have a lot of bets in the air for these kinds of things to pay off in the long run -- so you can imagine what kind of money some of these people have.
That having beeen said, I'm definitely glad that they're loosing their shirt, shorts and toupé on this one.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Of course it is a strong buy - the analysts need suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestors to buy the worthless stock off of Baystar.
With all their Hockey Hullaballoo!
And that Bitch Ann Murray Too!
should wait until SCO wins their case. Then their stock will undoubtedly go up and they'll be rolling in dough... right?
Reminds me of the bully in school who picks on you every day and challenges you to a fight, and then when you finally agree to meet him after school, he's not there.
SCO's investors should hang by them until all their bones are ashes. Take a cue from the Bush administration and never say you've made a mistake. Stay the course... thousand points of light.. etc... We're all taking notes you stupid moron investement bankers.
Has anyone suggested purchasing those "copyrights" for the purpose of putting them out in the public domain?
Perhaps someone with more financial/legal savvy could put together a trust fund to keep a vulture-like watch on SCO, ready to snap up the "copyrights" on the cheap once they go under.
Donations from a couple thousand ./'ers and a few interested corporations could ensure that no SCO-wannabes rise, Phoenix-like, from the rubble of this whole mess.
(I suspect, however, that no company in its right mind would bother taking up a case that bankrupted SCO and is entirely without merit. No one says that Microsoft is in its right mind, though...)
I'll give you an example. Two brothers, Bob and Joe, have become very wealthy hockey players. Bob pisses away his money. He buys expensive cars, has statues erected and lives the high life. Many people are employed and jobs are created to provide the expensive items he is buying. However, these items are quickly consumed and there is no lasting benefit to society.
Joe invests his money in a telecommunications company. Using investor's money the company is able to fund research into high-speed data transfer methods. Money that Joe made from his hockey career is now paying for this research. Jobs are created, total knowledge of society is increased and society (consumers/businesses) receive better products and technology. This is the magic of our free markets.
Now take a different example: Bob spends his money on expensive cars. The car company takes the money they made off his purchases and invests it in R&D, and develops an entirely new power source, revolutionizing transportation.
Joe, on the othe hand, invests his money in a telecommunication company that subsequently fails. The technology the company develops is lost and Joe becomes a homeless preacher screaming "God will seek vengance on your souls" to passerbys in Times Square.
The point? That your examples are meaningless. You simply attributed a positive outcome to the action you endore, and a negative outcome to the action you disagree with.
The whole idea of a "market" is that, on average, any investment will return approximately the same value. Usually higher risk investments, such as those that VC's engage in, return more, since it is necessary to have a lot of money in the first place to participate in those. But in general, the market itself performs the equalization, making sure that there is not a huge advantage to investing in one area.
Investing money is only beneficial to society if the end result of the investment benefits society. Is it beneficial to invest in a company that makes nuclear weapons to sells them to terrorists? In that case, I think we would rather that you spend your money on the Ferrari.
It's been a while since I read Catch 22, but wasn't there a point in the book where one of Yossarian's friends was buying eggs at 12 cents per and selling them at 9 cents per but making money because he owned both ends of the deal? I think it was the same guy who walked around with horse apples in his cheeks.
Maybe Baystar got themselves some of that...
All's true that is mistrusted
1) Invest millions into a well known company 2) Watch as the value of the investment changes 3) Prof... D'oh
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
Well, it's quite simple, it's like our days growing up on the ranch. If you took the cattle up on the mountains in the Summer-time, and in the fall, you went to round them up, you had to watch where you stepped because the ground was covered with manure. Well that's what these lawsuits are like. We're in the process of covering everything around us with bullshit.
Didn't realize they were synonymous.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
and no fucking wonder my service fees skyrocketed.
biggest bank in canada, makes a massive profit, but i am still stuck paying out their "losses"
i want the prick who thought SCO was a good investment to be held accountable. i want shards of shattered SCO install CDs rammed under this guy's fingernails!
I dealt several years with the Royal Bank of Canada and they have been the most arrogant, obnoxious sons of bitches..
Bankers who never return phone calls, interest rates higher than other banks, crazy random-number service fees.
I went in one day comparing mortgages and shopped around. The Royal's offer seemed pretty high compared to the others and the response was a brush off, 'sorry there is nothing we can do to help you'. I closed my accounts and moved everything to Scotia and have been very happy since...
Arrogant bastards, serves them right for SCO
In 6 1/2 months, they've now converted their investment to $13 million in cash and $13.7 million of common stock, for a loss of almost half their investment.
The litigatious Baystar human trash are going to invest that 13 million in another Linux suit. Why? Because they have and they can.
.... have something called morals and principles.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Follow the flock?
I applaude people that are prepared to take their money elsewhere based on their morals and principles
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Thanks.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
No matter that their main investor dumped SCO they'll present it as earnings. They got $37M ($50M-$13M) in exchange for roughly 2.8M shares (2.1M for Baystar, .7M for RBC). that means they sold these shares at about $13/share when the current market price is $5 (in fact it's even worse than that: those shares are newly minted and cost SCO zilch, they only cost the common shareholder money by watering down SCOX).
SCO already delayed their earnings report to take these recent developments into account. Probably they're trying to find some way of creative accounting to assign some of these "earnings" to Q2 (difficult, since this really happened in Q3).
But the bottom line is: SCO screwed their investor and will advertise this as a good deal. Maybe SCOs common shareholders should consider that they're also just a bunch of investors, only with less privileges than BayStar had with their A-1 preferred shares.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
More like they need a week to figure out how to spin the story on Baystar and RBC.
What f*** are you talking about?
Who's Joe, and where is Alice?
I'm going to miss SCO when this is over. Read through this thread. What else will generate all of this humor, hate, and foolishness when we don't have them to pick on.
Darl you are an idiot, but you have made life intersting.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Now, if I can just persuade them to let me pay back my student loan on the same terms that they let SCO pay them back... :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
But all of the clones could use dos. That was the cool thing that made clones possible. a compaq couldn't be a clone of an ibm pc if it didn't run dos. If IBM had signed an exclusive deal with ms for dos, then they would have been screwed. So yes, Dos sucked, but it sucked equally across all of the clones. And that is what got us where we are today.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It occurs to me though that Baystar could secretly sell all of their stock to IBM as part of IBM's plan to conduct a hostile takeover of SCOX. I'm not sure how many outstanding shares there are (and how many Daryl has) or the poison pill policies, but it is concievable they could still be bought out at a highly reduced rate (because no one wants to see Daryl get paid off) which would cease litigation and preserve the code, copyright violation or not, forever.
The problem is that we have NO Joes left, apparently. The Bobs have taken over completely- the Joes have been squeezed out of the market. So why bother to have a market when we have only Bobs and no Joes? Wouldn't we be better off redesigning the whole concept of wealth to eliminate the ability for ANYBODY to be a Bob?
My favorite idea on this score is this: Personal income is limited to $125,000/year single, $250,000/year joint. Anybody should be able to live on that, live in luxury even. NOBODY under that ammount should pay taxes. ALL personal income over that ammount should be spent in payroll or 100% taxes. There is NO need to allow people to accumulate huge ammounts of wealth. EVER.
If you are getting more than that, then you're a Bob, by definition. If you're spending all your money, on investments, R&D, then you're really putting it out as payroll- and that shouldn't be taxed either.
Of course, what I really object to is neither the Bobs or the Joes- but rather the Kenny Lays of this world, who do nothing for thier wealth other than steal it from other people.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The difference is that a very small portion of the expensive car is profit. GM made 186.16B last year and only had 2.6B profit. The majority portion of that car was consumed. Sure some of the money trickles down but it is an insignificant amount. The cost of the car pays for things like secartaries at GM, pulling metals out of the ground and building huge factories.
The problem with putting a limit on wealth is that it kills entrepaneurial incentives. I run a business that employs five people. Last year I made more than your limit. If the limit was in place I would take a 6 month vacation after I hit the cap. That would likely cause my company of five employees become a company of three. Entrepreuners drive this economy and create a majority of new wealth.
What Lay did is illegal under our current system. We don't need any changes we just need much much better inforcement which we are now seeing.
The problem with putting a limit on wealth is that it kills entrepaneurial incentives.
If you need money to keep being and entrepaneur- then you're in the wrong field. I know of no way to take a vacation and turn my brain off- it's ALWAYS working. However, there's another option to taking the vacation: PAY YOUR EMPLOYEES WHAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY WORTH RATHER THAN STEALING MONEY FROM THEIR WORK!How come you earn so much off of your five employees, and you're not expanding to six or eight employees? What makes you think you're so much better than everybody else that you deserve to live like a king when 500,000 engineers are out of work?
What Lay did is illegal under our current system. We don't need any changes we just need much much better inforcement which we are now seeing.
If what Lay did was illegal under our current system, why isn't he in jail? In fact, why has he yet to be even indicted for embezzeling millions? It's obvious that the letter of the law and the enforcement of the law have a huge gap. Until that gap is removed- the system is severely broken. And I see no reason why I should be forced to pay taxes out of my unemployment check to support a broken system that could EASILY be repaired with a few well-placed executions.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Actually, they can get rid of their shares in much faster than 80 days. Assuming the last five days averaged the same as their 3 month average (given on Yahoo), 292K. 10% of that is 29.2K. Of course, the next day, the 5 day average has moved up slightly because of the added 10% of volume. Each day of 10% additional volume increases the average and the amount they can trade.
You can do the calculations in Excel to see that it would only take 26 days for them to sell 2 million shares. Ah, the wonders of compounding!
If you feel that way about capitalism, why not move to the Soviet Union, um, I mean East Germany, uh, wait, ah, communist China? hmm, no, not really there either...
the economy is a myth- a shared myth, but still a myth.
Economies self-create, they are not shared myths. We do have an artificial economy filled with rules and laws to keep it "stable". Just because the artificial economy exists doesn't mean the real one is a myth; in fact, it's often hard to tell where the real and artificial economies intersect.
There SHOULD be no risk in new ideas at all
The real risk in any new idea is that you waste your time pursuing it. In our world, time is money; if you aren't out making money, you can't buy the things you need (food, clothing, etc.). So, if you want to take the time to develop new ideas, you need a backer.
The other thing about new ideas is that there is a plethora of them on a daily basis. If you want to inform people about your new idea, you have to have a voice. Money talks -- if you have none, you need a backer.
I never said these situations were the ideal economy. The idea that venture capitalists simply sit back and earn off the hard work of others, however, is just plain stupid. That isn't the way our economy works, and you can't have a modern capitalism without VC.
Just survive on wellfare until your idea gets off the ground.
And this is better than VC's "living off the hard-working"? How, exactly? I can't imagine that you'd like to pay 50-70% of your income in taxes to support people that think they have good ideas. Or, if you would, wouldn't you rather have some control over where your money went, like to people with ideas you think have merit?
In short, if you think capitalism is good, you have to accept the necessity of VC. If you think capitalism is bad, put your effort where your mouth is -- quit your job, join a socialist or communist "community" and prove us all wrong.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Economies self-create, they are not shared myths. We do have an artificial economy filled with rules and laws to keep it "stable". Just because the artificial economy exists doesn't mean the real one is a myth; in fact, it's often hard to tell where the real and artificial economies intersect.
True enough, as far as it goes- but as soon as you get much beyond the barter stage, you've added one big huge piece of fakery to the whole mess- money. And that's where the myth comes in. Money has NO objective value, it's all subjective, an invention of mankind.
The real risk in any new idea is that you waste your time pursuing it. In our world, time is money; if you aren't out making money, you can't buy the things you need (food, clothing, etc.). So, if you want to take the time to develop new ideas, you need a backer.
And thus we get back to the myth- the axiom that time is money is completely meaningless because money itself is meaningless- it's just a shared myth.
The other thing about new ideas is that there is a plethora of them on a daily basis. If you want to inform people about your new idea, you have to have a voice. Money talks -- if you have none, you need a backer.
Money only talks because of the shared myth that money has value. Money is an invention of mankind- we can make it do anything we want it to.
I never said these situations were the ideal economy. The idea that venture capitalists simply sit back and earn off the hard work of others, however, is just plain stupid. That isn't the way our economy works, and you can't have a modern capitalism without VC.
Finally a statement I almost agree with- except for the use of the word "modern" in this context. MODERN would be to abandon resource distribution based on money and enable resource distribution based on the algorithims we've worked so hard to create over the last 35 years of computer science. I fully agree though- any economic system based on the 17th century myth of money MUST have VCs.
And this is better than VC's "living off the hard-working"? How, exactly? I can't imagine that you'd like to pay 50-70% of your income in taxes to support people that think they have good ideas. Or, if you would, wouldn't you rather have some control over where your money went, like to people with ideas you think have merit?
If you haven't gotten the point yet- money itself is the myth. Using money for resource allocation is horribly inefficient; it sucks WAY too many man hours out of the system. It was better than the centralized order system based on divine right that it replaced, but we've got better systems available now; in the last 35 years we've trained large numbers of people to deal with complex systems.
Capitalism itself is neither good nor bad; nor is communism in and of itself good or bad, they're just tools. The problem comes in when a small minority misuses the tools to the detriment of everybody else in the community (which both you and I are already members of, independance being yet another shared myth), at which point we should have the right as human beings to *change the system*. Unfortuneately, the current system, being based on another outdated myth of private ownership, prevents any sort of large scale, or even small scale, change. Any attempt to form a moneyless economy will be met with resistance, and ultimately, armed conflict.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
See- that's the problem. Corporatism long ago took over any real attempts at either Capitalism or Communism- there's no place that you can go left on the planet where you can escape. Except for maybe Forest Park. No, on second thought, Frank and his daughter Ruth were found, and then had to disappear again because of all of the media coverage.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.