SCO Caps Legal Expenses At $31 Million

uniqueCondition points to a story on News.com, writing "With SCO's legal costs reaching $7.3 million in their most recent quarter, nearly half of the $15 million it has spent in the last five quarters, SCO can't afford this kind of litigation. They have therefore limited their payment to $31 million for the entire case and is giving their legal team a larger slice of any settlement SCO achieves. Under the current agreement, the firm's contingency payment is 20 percent of a settlement. Under the new agreement, that increases to a range of 20 to 33 percent." uniqueCondition links also to coverage at Techrepublic.com, InformationWeek and The Inquirer.

Comments

Begging to be bought out

[SeanTobin]

SCO is just begging to be bought out now. Take a look at this gem from the end of the news.com.com article:

SCO also announced its board has approved a revised shareholder rights plan designed to make a hostile takeover harder, though no such attempts are under way, McBride said.

"Where the share prices are at now, we are concerned about somebody who would be opportunistic. What's to keep IBM or somebody else from coming in and taking (SCO) out at a much lower price than the claims you have on the table?" he asked.

Ahh... the joys of watching scumbag companies dangle in the wind. I almost feel sorry for their shareholders.

Re:Begging to be bought out

[UnknowingFool]

IBM could just buy SCO and put it out of everyone else's misery, and save money doing it. Plus, they could get the satisfaction of firing Darl McBride.

That would be the quick and easy solution. I think IBM wants it to be painful for SCO. If IBM wins on its counterclaims of infringement, it could own SCO outright. With its portfolio of patents and copyrights and heavy purse strings, IBM could bankrupt SCO through legal battles and settlement claims. As the major creditor, IBM then owns SCO.

It could then do worse then just to fire Darl. As the owner of SCO, it then has access to all SCO's files. If it finds any legal wrongdoing on Darl's or any other exec's part, it could pursue legal action against them for fraud, perjury, damage to the company, etc. They could then go after all of the money he's gotten so far. This would send a clearer message to anyone who might think about pulling another stunt like this.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know why after making a post, your IP is contacted by a Slashdot-server (in my case 66.35.250.150), which makes a "GET /" request, and on success further requests to the links in the directory-index.

Try it: post something, then watch your access_log.

Re:Question

[chihowa]

66.35.250.150 (resolved to slashdot.org) scanned me for open proxies after I posted. It then poked around on my webserver for a bit.

Everyone loses on SCO's side

[UnknowingFool]

The contigency increase only matters if SCO wins. SCO won't win. Therefore their attorneys will only get their fees paid. In the event IBM wins on any of it's counterclaims of infringement, that means SCO will have to shell out lots of money to fight it. If they're lucky IBM will settle, but I don't think IBM wants to settle. If IBM finally gets the discovery it wants, IBM might find more issues of wrongdoing.

Then SCO has to fend off Novell, RedHat and Autozone on any counterclaims they may have. Then they all could sue SCO for slander of title, abuse of process. If the GPL holds up in court, everyone that has code in Linux (including IBM, SUSE, RedHat, etc) could sue for damages. The only winners for SCO are the execs that have cashed out. But the SEC is looking into that.

The worst part is...

[DownWithTheMan]

They still believe they can win and are in the right... I live in Provo UT (student at BYU; yes yes I know crazy mormons blah blah blah, i totally agree)... Anyways I go to the same church ward as Ralph Yarro (Chairman of the Board of SCO, and CEO of Canopy Group)... Every Sunday I love to slam Ralphie with questions about what's going on on the SCO Titanic... He tells me over and over that they (SCO) have the moral highground and are in the right... He also says that in his heart of hearts he believes they will win the lawsuite against IBM... And after a win against IBM, he thinks the lawsuites like the ones against Chysler and AutoZone, will all just start to drop in... Whatever crack that guy's smokin'... I want some...

Why would anybody want to buy SCO?

[Secrity]

I find it pretty amazing that SCO has the cajones to believe that anybody would be interested in taking them over. I believe that their stock is as high as it is right now (if under $4 a share is high) only because SCO has been buying it's own stock. What do they own? They have some money in the bank, much of which they owe to their lawyers and to others; they also own a UNIX distribution that that people are not busting down the doors to buy. SCO seems to believe that they own the copyright to System V, Linux and UNIX in general; they may actually own some sort of rights to System V, but SCO's copyright claims are being contested by somed of the current owners. SCO has a number of pending lawsuits, and so far the verdicts in their lawsuits have been against them. Their anti-takeover defense is as useless as any of their other claims.

Makes sense to me.

[mcc]

They want to avoid people posting through open proxies since open proxies are the standard method of ban evasion by trolls. So I assume when you post, they do some quick checks to check for evidence your computer has any sort of open or web-based proxy on it.

I assume if they hit anything, they'll either block you from posting further, or just flag you as a potential "problem user" or something. I suppose the thing to do here would be set up an open proxy on your computer and then attempt to post from it, and see if antyhing happens.