SCO's Finances, Legal Case Take Hits

geomon writes "This afternoon, SCO will host a conference call where they will present '04 third quarter financial data. The news isn't expected to be comforting to SCO investors as they are coming up a bit short; earnings and dividends will take a substantial hit. The only bright spot for the company is the settlement with BayStar, a deal that will leave most of the cash they received from the investment house in the hands of SCO management, if only for a short time." Reader ak_hepcat writes "Groklaw has posted the text for the latest IBM memorandum in its case against SCO. In a nutshell, IBM accuses SCO of not only wrangling the legal process to keep delaying the eventual resolution of this case, but they go so far as to pull the curtain away and show that this table never had any legs to begin with. I'm no marksman, but I can tell when something is full of holes."

Comments

There's a better Groklaw article.

[Jaywalk]

I think the more important Groklaw story is this one. The part I found telling was:

Pacer indicates that the SCO-Novell hearing on Novell's motion to dismiss is going to be held on September 15 at 2 PM before Judge Kimball . . . That's not only the same day as the SCO v. IBM hearing on IBM's 10th Counterclaim, it's the same time.

Since the same judge is handling both cases, I can't conceive of a situation where he would want to claim the Novell suit should not be dismissed and that the IBM counter-claim should be denied. Continuing the Novell suit would complicate the IBM suit, so trying to handle them both in the same afternoon would be a potload of work. If, on the other hand, he plans to grant the Novell dismissal on the grounds that the copyrights were never transferred, it would allow him to grant IBM's PSJ on the same grounds.

I'm just guessing here, but if I'm right his is very bad for SCO. It would mean that Novell keeps the UNIX copyrights, the IBM case is limited to the Monterey contract and the Red Hat case can proceed with a finding on record that SCO has been blowing smoke about its UNIX IP.

Want to listen ?

[Anonymous Coward]

here you go

ahh the beauty of the Internet
and the stock is currently trading at $3.80, 6mo performance is definatly a sell

results are in and it's not good

[abrotman]

results

Earnings report has been released

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they posted it ahead of time knowing someone would post the results in the comments, like this: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040831/latu104_1.html.

Summary: Revenue is $11,025,000 which is way down from 3Q03 revenues of $20,055,000. The SCOsource revenues are $667,000 vs. $7,280,000 in 3Q03. But, the SCOsource revenue was only $11,000 in 2Q04.

Strangely enough, the stock is up 6 cents in after hours trading.

Re:No Legs? Full of Holes?

[UnknowingFool]

Let's see:
In one corner, SCO has Sontag and Gupta, two of their employees. One of them is unknown in his credentials.

In the other corner, IBM has Dr. Brian Kernighan (Princeton) who with Dennis Ritchie wrote the first C programming book. Kernighan has also written seminal books in many other programming guides and languages.

IBM also has Dr. Randall Davis (MIT) whose expert testimony was used in not one but two of the benchmarks that are cited as case law in all software copyright infringement cases (CAI v. Altai and Gates Rubber v. Bando).

I wouldn't say it looks bad for SCO but I would bet a blind money could hammer away at a typewriter and finish writing Hamlet before I would bet SCO would win.