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SCO On the Rocks
Netromancer wrote in to alert us to a Businessweek Online article discussing the downward spiral in SCO's fortunes and luck. From the article: "The mouse that roared is barely squeaking these days. A string of recent setbacks raises grave questions about SCO's finances, its court case, and its management."
> Who would have thought that basing a company on litigation,
> scare tactics, and spreading FUD wouldn't work?
Microsoft?
The question is not as of when will the guillotine fall, it's how high will it be before it does.
Considering SCO's screwups and legal wranglings, i'd say that the height will be stratospheric and more than a few heads will be in the stocks when it falls.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
This is to the [Linux] zealots: You must be celebrating this news somehow. Of course you wish for even better news. Remember one thing...after SCO, another will be minted. Also remember that according to Microsoft's Ballmer, there is no significant Linux deployment anywhere on earth. One wonders where those revenues are coming from.
I've been trying since they were nearly $20/share but my broker said something about it not being available. Did Wall Street see them as being full of shit, too?
Maureen O'Gara, who hitched her wagon for whatever reason to the SCO star, looks to be in all sorts of trouble too by the look of this feedback thread.
Darl has a history of litigation. He's sued THREE of his employers, has taken legal action against one of his kid's schools, sued 2 financial advisors and one of his wives is involved in 2 lawsuits against neighbours.
It's a bit like the social situation where generations of families become dependent on welfare, and as it's all they know it's all they continue doing. With Darl, it's litigation.
At this point they're probably running company affairs from their yachts, and when it implodes, so what? Won't hurt them at all, and in a year or two they'll be hired on by some other group of corporate leeches and they'll drain another company dry.
If I were dumb enough to hold SCO stock until the bitter end, I would be pretty embarassed, and litigious.
Don't the execs face severe legal punishment for this?
This is a bit off-topic, but your point about the exec who's saving over $1 million a year with Linux is important. Word of mouth, in the IT world as most other places, is the best advertising there is. That's something that MS hasn't figured out about its "Get The Facts" campaign. It isn't working because the people who make decisions about strategic Linux installations/conversions don't generally pay much attention to glitzy ads and websites. Instead, they have lunch with Joe down the street whose company just switched to Linux and is saving X dollars per year. To them, that's much more relevant than any amount of advertising.
That's also why the SCO suit failed to have much lasting impact on the adoption of Linux. After the initial flood of "the world of Linux is falling" stories, people realized that the SCO move is nothing but a blatant attempt to blackmail IBM and the Linux community for the benefit of MS. Once the facts of the MS involvement in backing SCO financially, combined with the utter lack of factual backing for SCO's claims, became known most people, except perhaps Laura Didio, understand that the whole SCO ploy is a sham and nothing to worry about.
I hope that the SEC starts looking into the stock manipulations that McBride and company have been pulling. It would be fitting to see all of them follow Martha into imprisonment. It would be even nicer if they ended up in someplace like Marion, in with the general population.
Just my $.02,
Ron
Impeach Barack Obama for violating the Constitutional requirement to be a "natural born" citizen to hold the office of P
Yeah, but... but... I want them to flame out in a huge court loss. I want SCO's finances and future prospects to be devastated. I want a clear and definitive signal that Linux is safe and SCO was stupid to butt heads with Open Source.
This whole "fading" thing sounds like it just leaves too many doors open for other stupid companies to do bad things, because there is no jarring precedent burned into people's minds.
Translation: "We pretty much fired everyone except for the accountant. After all, who needs developers on staff when the OSS guys work for free? Right?"
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I used to work as an engineer on the Caldera server and desktop teams. I was part of the many layoffs which reduced the engineering forces there to nothing. It was sas seeing friends go and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before it was their turn.
However, also being a founding trustee memeber of the Salt Lake Linux Users Group and a Linux and OpenSource advocate for years, I am very grateful that I was able to leave before the name change to SCO and the "direction change" - I would have had to quit anyway.
I still have a couple friends there. The amazing thing is that I ran into one of them (Walt Hammond) yesterday (Fri. March 4, 2005) at lunch. I was amazed at his comments. The feeling inside the company is very positive! I couldn't beleive it. It seems that (from my stand point) that the co-workers are completely blind to what is really happening. Not only with reguard to what is happening but also related to the morality (or lack thereof IMO) of their actions. He was completely positive saying that (parapharasing) "things looks so good for us right now but if you read the press, you'd think we were a sinking ship" and (again, paraphrasing) "the press says we've had major set backs but if you look, we've been winning".
I don't know if it's the blind leading the blind or if he really believes what he told me. Of course, being at the director level or above, I'd think you'd have to tote the company line or you wouldn't be around very long at SCO. So, who knows what he really believes.
Mecworks BLOG
That's a good point. It would be very interesting to see a break-down of what has been tested by this case, and any others. On the other hand, I don't think SCO is a bunch of idiots, as some people tend to believe. I think that if there was anything at all that they could have built a legitimate case on, they would have found it. Also, I'm sure that MS has taken apart Linux and looked at it carefully under a microscope. And SCO's case is the best thing that they could find to encourage/support? Seems like a pretty good test to me, but I really don't know. Thoughts?
If you spell it correctly it makes a lot more sense:
...
Gimme cracked corn and I don't care
gimme cracked corn and I don't care
The substance in question is corn whiskey.
White lignting, moonshine, mountain dew etc
While short on business, SCO held some potentially powerful copyrights.
The author treats SCO's ownership claims as gospel, but that has not been established in court. Novell has contested SCO's copyright ownership, a matter which is still in court. IBM has counter-sued SCO for copyright infringement and patent infringement. BSDi settled a suit against former Unix(r) owner USL which established that BSDi owned the major part of the unix(generic) copyrights, while USL held copyright on but a tiny historical remnant of the code base. SCO has a long way to go before they can be said to "hold" valid copyrights to any code that's still in use.
- Shipping a successful product
- Raising venture capital
- A successful IPO
Learn why in The Valley is a Harsh Mistress at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.-- Mike
Request your free CD of my piano music.
This is out-and-out-fraud.
Granted, stockholders want to sue for damages whenever their shareholder value goes down, whatever the reason, but this is not a simple case of the market going sour.
Here's a company with a stable but not so very exciting future ahead.
Along come some executives who decide to sacrifice the stable future on a gamble and steer the company into a legal battle with highly dubious claims (on the order of a million to one that this will go favorably). They know this, their advisors know this, industry insiders know this, but that still doesn't stop them from hiring the most popular law firm possible, and launch an intensive PR campaign blitz to pretend that this is all legit.
The blitz momentarily convinces the market that the claim has merit, and before any of the bullshit can get debunked, the executives and the law firm have all cashed their chips and are left playing house and putting on a face to the remaining shareholders while it all goes flaming down the toilet.
Oh, hey, but David Boies & Family did their due dilligence right? The case had to have merit at some point for them to take it? Otherwise, you know, they could be disbarred!
Well, that might be believable if they didn't stand to gain from this charade too, the bastards took payment in stock.
I expect the pending shareholder suit will name Boies
If this isn't fraud, I'll... just sit here and keep whining on Slashdot.
Hey! The Republicans probably have a bone to pick with David Boies, what with representing Gore and all in the 2000 election dispute. This SCO thing would be a great way for them to pretend to be punishing Wall Street greed while getting back at an old foe.
I'll write my Congressman.
Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought. -Terry Pratchett
Without a ruling, there is no precedent to stop companies in the future trying this same sort of crap. It has to go to trial and a verdict has to be issued to stop this from happening again and wasting more of the court's time. Besides we might not be lucky enough to find another company stupid enough to sue IBM.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
3.) Pay huge amounts of the companys money to your own brother in the name of legal fees. It looks like IBM and linux was never the real target, it looks like a set up to lose, milk SCO dry and leave with the money and a reputation of trying to take on big blue from a tiny little company with less staff than the average high school.
Or how about the case of Marconi, in the UK. It was run successfully by Lord Weinstock for years. The company had a large cash balance, but he was ousted by City-friendly management who then went on a high-tech spending spree in the late 90's. And we all know what happened to the tech industry come the turn of the century.
Result? The whole company gets flushed down the toilet, shareholders loose money, and normal employees loose their jobs. The directors, who's decisions led to this disaster in the first place, walk away with Big Cash Prizes.
Ugly face of capitalism, or what?