Back in the day of short stories, there was no Internet. There was much less television. There weren't any video games. There were plenty of movies, but they weren't big on special effects.
So if you were a geek in 1930, or 1960, what were you going to do for geeky entertainment? You were going to pull out a copy of Astounding or Galaxy for your geek media fix!
SF was driven by short stories and novelettes in those days. Asimov, Heinlein, Bester, Clarke, Ellison: they were all prolific story writers. Even the Foundation books were originally written for magazine publication.
Now this isn't the whole story, because science fiction itself went through some changes independent of the development of competing media (the New Wave of the 1960's). Also I think that American culture, at least, has become a lot more pessimistic and blase about science and the future.
But the media changes have had a large impact on the market for science fiction, and hence the nature of science fiction.
What about the code that The SCO Group knowingly distributed under the GPL, such as the entire Linux kernel? Do you believe that the SCO has abandoned all of its copyright interest in that code?
When I say "knowingly", I'm referring to the code that The SCO Group distributed after March 6, 2003. SCO certainly has actual knowledge of the contents of its own legal filings, so that constitutes knowledge of what's in the source code that SCO continued to distribute.
Seriously, I don't think the products and services side is going to last six months. I heard that Opinder Bawa left. I know for a fact that he sold all his stock, exercised all his options, and then sold that stock too. Do you have a new VP of engineering yet?
And as the products and services wither, it will become more and more obvious that SCO is just a lawsuit machine, which will make it more and more of a pariah in the IT world.
Well, pal, I get my data from sec.gov and provide links to the original data. You come in with a vague claim of "long and complex history" and no supporting data. If you think there's something incorrect about SEC's data, point it out.
Show me a link to a financial statement, on sec.gov or elsewhere, which shows The SCO Group making money.
I'll tell you the long and complex history. You used to work for a company known as the "Santa Cruz Operation". Then in August 2000 a company named "Caldera" bought out your major line of business, including the field offices and the employees in them. You work in Washington, as you mentioned elsewhere, which probably means that you transfered from "Santa Cruz Operation" to "Caldera".
Later on, in May 2003, "Caldera" changed its name to "The SCO Group". Meanwhile, the company formerely known as "The Santa Cruz Operation" changed its name to Tarentella.
So from your point of view, the "long and complex history" includes a transition from "Santa Cruz Operation" -> "Caldera" -> "The SCO Group". But from my point of view, it's pretty simple. The primary businesses of The SCO Group are to file lawsuits and fuck with Linux. The other business is a money-losing legacy Unix business with declining revenue.
You can't grow your way to profitability if you aren't growing, and SCO's Unix business is not growing.
Gosh, you can't even read to the end of the comment before jerking your knee, can you?
Just keep reading until you get to this part:
In fact it's such a stupid move that it makes wonder about conspiracy theories, like SCO's lawyers filed in the wrong court on purpose in order to add additional delay.
Prior to 1997, the company currently known as The SCO Group never reported a profit. Here's information from your S-1 registration
Began operations in 1994 Year ended 1995-10-31 revenue $0, net income ($1,350,000) Year ended 1996-10-31 revenue $1,108,000, net income ($2,757,000) Year ended 1997-10-31 revenue $1,117,000, net income ($8,148,000) Year ended 1998-10-31 revenue $1,057,000, net income ($7,963,000) Year ended 1999-10-31 revenue $3,050,000, net income ($9,367,000)
So who exactly is this "we" you are talking about? Because "your" company, The SCO Group, has had no profit in its entire history, except for the profit from the SCO Source program.
SCO sued IBM in a Utah state court, carefully writing their lawsuit so that there were no federal issues in it. SCO can do this because both SCO and IBM are both corporate residents of the same state, Delaware.
Or so SCO's lawyers said in their lawsuit. IBM slapped the fuck out of them by pointing out that IBM is incorporated in New York, and here is a certified copy of IBM's Certificate of Incorporation, and here's a bunch of legal precedents which say that a court has to recognize the actual state that a defendant is really in, not the state that the clot-headed plaintiff incorrectly writes in the complaint. Hence, because IBM and SCO are corporate residents of different states, a lawsuit between them for an amount greater than $75,000 must be heard in federal court, not in state court.
It was really a boneheaded move on the part of SCO's lawyers. Boies spent 10 years of his career working for IBM and he doesn't know what state it's incorporated in?! And none of their high-priced paralegals can read the first page of a 10-Q or a 10-K, the part that says:
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)
NEW YORK
(State of incorporation)
In fact it's such a stupid move that it makes me wonder about conspiracy theories, like SCO's lawyers filed in the wrong court on purpose in order to add additional delay.
As far as the federal judge assigned to the case, read the excellent Groklaw article on Judge Kimball.
Just because she married Bill doesn't immediately make this a freakin' conspiracy.
I agree. The world of high-tech is small and I'm willing to accept this as coincidence.
However, the fact that Microsoft wrote a check to SCO for $6 million does make this look like a conspiracy.
And the fact that Sun wrote a check to SCO, and Sun received an equity position in SCO, and Sun now loudly proclaims their products as legally compliant with SCO due to their 10-year old license -- but Sun does NOT talk about the license + stock warrant agreement they signed wit SCO in February 2003 -- looks even more like a conspiracy.
And Canopy+Center7 (another Canopy subsidiary) just settled a suit against Computer Associates for $40 million.
I am not a PR guy, but heck, this is Slashdot, none of us are very good at persuading people whose values are different from ours. So here goes: I think this would make a good PR meme: if you do business with a Canopy company, you have a high risk of getting sued. I would love to see that meme get some traction in the mainstream business press.
Indeed, SCO had revenue of $64 million for the year ended 2002-10-31 versus revenue of $40 million for the year ended 2001-10-31.
You omit to say that SCO made no profit on that revenue.
For the year ended 2001-10-31, SCO reported a net loss of $131 million. For the year ended 2002-10-31, SCO reported a net loss of $25 million.
To say that they are only alive by the licensing revenue provided by MS is misguided.
Don't confuse revenue with income/loss. A company doesn't survive very long by selling $64 million of products when they have $89 million in expenses.
Also, in August 2002, SCO hired Morgan Keenan to advise SCO on raising money through equity financing, debt financing, or mergers, acquisitions, or joint ventures. (I'm paraphrasing from the April 10-Q). That is SCO's recognition that SCO was running out of money last year. In the conference call for the April quarter, Darl McBride said that they no longer needed to raise money in the capital markets specifically because of the SCO Source license agreement.
SCO's 10-Q for April 30 states that they have only two customers for SCO Source (for that quarter). I think that's what Burrito Warrior was talking about.
That plus the fact that everything in SCO besides SCO Source is unprofitable.
There are a lot of numbers here. I'll summarize the ones that I usually look at: total revenue and net income.
Quarter ended 2002-07-31: revenue $15,384,000 income ($4,511,000) Quarter ended 2003-10-31: revenue $15,468,000 income ($2,729,000) Quarter ended 2003-01-31: revenue $13,540,000 income ($724,000) Quarter ended 2003-04-30: revenue $21,369,000 income $4,500,000
Numbers in parentheses are negative.
Notice there are no numbers for 2003-07-31 yet. SCO hasn't filed those numbers officially with the SEC yet. But they have announced these numbers to the press.
Quarter ended 2003-07-31: revenue $20,100,000, net income $3,100,000
It looks like the management has really turned SCO around in the past two quarters.
The change is due to SCO's new "SCO Source" program. By digging into SCO's press releases and 10-Q's, I found that SCO Source had $8.25 million in revenue and $6 million in gross margin for 2003-04-30, and $7.3 million in revenue and $5.6 million in gross margin for 2003-07-31.
So let me restate those numbers above for SCO's two lines of business:
SCO Products and Services
Quarter ended 2002-07-31: revenue $15,384,000 income ($4,511,000) Quarter ended 2002-10-31: revenue $15,468,000 income ($2,729,000) Quarter ended 2003-01-31: revenue $13,540,000 income ($724,000) Quarter ended 2003-04-30: revenue $13,119,000 income ($1,500,000) Quarter ended 2003-07-31: revenue $12,800,000 income ($2,500,000)
SCO Source (customers: Microsoft and Sun)
Quarter ended 2003-04-30: revenue $8,250,000 income $6,000,000 Quarter ended 2003-07-31: revenue $7,300,000 income $5,600,000
Darl McBride says that SCO's core business is the products and services. You can see that the products and services are unprofitabe -- in fact, they have been unprofitable for every quarter of SCO's existence ever since they started business as Caldera. Even worse for SCO, the gross revenue from products and services is dropping.
Why does this matter? It matters because Kieran O'Shaugnessy, SCO's "man in Australia", said this (according to Groklaw):
"This IP battle is only one part of SCO's business and is an add-on component. The core of SCO's business is profitable."
Well, the core of SCO's business is not profitable, and SCO's core revenues are declining too. In fact, SCO Source is the only profitable division at SCO.
Insider sales were consistently zero for years up until Monday, March 10, 2003, when they started taking on high non-zero values that are inconsistent with the values before Monday, March 10, 2003.
SCO filed suit on Friday, March 7, 2003, and then the CFO started selling stock right after the weekend was over.:)
SCO's claims against IBM are very public. The text of the lawsuit is available to anyone who is considering the purchase of SCOX stock. SCO even provides copies of much of that information on their own web site.
If some of the claims are grossly false, or baseless, that would be fraud. But it's not trading on material non-public information, because an investor can see what SCO is suing about before buying SCOX.
As far as their claims about Linux go, that's beyond my level of legal knowledge. It's certainly public knowledge that SCO plans to invoice Linux users; what the prices and terms of the license are; and so on. There is certainly "non-public information" about the actual content (if any) of their evidence. But it's quite public that SCO claims to have some evidence.
Interestingly, SCO has not filed a Reg FD form about their Las Vegas slide show. They probably should.
If you look you'll see that the amount of stock trades by SCO execs has been fairly consistent for years...
I'm calling you out, astro-turfer.
Sales of SCOX by insiders in calendar year 2001: 0. Sales of SCOX by insiders in calendar year 2002: 0. Sales of SCOX by insiders in 2003 before announcement of IBM lawsuit: 0.
The Dell news is positive for SCO. Dell says they won't idemnify, which makes SCO look better.
Plus, the news about SCO's Las Vegas slideshow getting debunked didn't get much traction in the media. It got overshadowed by ESR talking about how an open-source partisan was doing illegal things to SCO's web site. That was really bad PR on Erics' part.
Plus a good old-fashioned short squeeze, led by that hedge fund which was buying shares. They seem to be through buying because the volume has dropped back down again.
Have a closer look at the intra-day chart. SCOX was actually up $1.25 in the morning and is drifting down and levelling out.
I am going to short when -- a bunch of good news (good for SCO that is) comes out and the stock goes down anyways. I might not be able to get in by then, but that's okay. It's much easier to ride a trend than to call a top.
You are right, fraud and insider trading are different things.
Fraud would be making knowingly false statements, like BRE-X and its gold mines.
Insider trading is defined as "trading on material non-public information". The essence of the crime is that the seller knows something important that the buyer does not know.
The "safe harbor" for SCO executives is that they irrevocably committed to sell this stock back in January, before the price went up. The weakness in their safe harbor is that they surely knew they were about to embark on a lawsuit and PR campaign. In my opinion the real evidence would be the timing they had on their negotiations with Microsoft and Sun to fund their anti-Linux campaign. After all, SCO already hired Boies back in January.
Now if a SCO executive had a 10b5-1 plan set up in, say, July 2001, they would have a much stronger position that they didn't know back in July 2001 SCO was gonna hire McBride, exit the Linux business, and enter the FUD business.
"Oversight" and "regulation" come down to this: government filters packets. Then they drop packets, arrest the senders and/or recipients of the packets.
It sounds like it's a great idea when the government filters packets that you don't like: spam, viruses, copyright infringing materials, decss, bomb-making instructions, child pornography, gay pornography, abortion literature.
Some people like some of those things. Too bad. The big illusion of government regulation is that the supporters think the government is going to regulate the way that the supporters think is good. But the government actually regulates in whatever way the government thinks is good, and the more power it has, the more it regulates. All of the material above has been the subject of government filtering already. And now the NY Times wants more.
I'd like to ask the New York Times how much "government oversight" they want to have on the content of their newspaper.
Re:For what it'w worth...
on
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· Score: 2, Funny
Still under a DDOS:P
The Slashdotting will continue until the DDOS improves.:)
Now you're backpedaling ...
on
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· Score: 1
There is nothing in current or past SEC filings which suggests MS or Sun are supporting SCO. There's no suggestion in the filings that either of those companies is paying SCO anything on an on-going basis.
... and it still doesn't work. You're full of shit. I busted your first post wide open with a direct link to sec.gov. Now I'm gonna bust your second post, too -- same 10-Q, same page.
"The two licensing agreements signed by us to date resulted in revenue of $8,250,000 during the April 30, 2003 quarter and provide for an aggregate of an additional $5,000,000 to be paid to us over the next three quarters."
Extra credit, since you can't read a 10-Q even after the link is shoved in your face:
"These contracts do not provide for any payments beyond 2003, except that Microsoft was granted the option to acquire expanded licensing rights, at its election, that would result in additional payments to us if exercised."
Re:SCO's business plan
on
SCO Roundup
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· Score: 1
You're poorly informed. Sun confirmed that they are the first licensee here:
Unlike you, I actually bother to read what SCO reports.
Re:Code belongs to copyright holder, not community
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· Score: 1
No, if you actually read the GPL, you will see that all of my copyrighted work remains my work and I can license it on any terms I want. See section 2: "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works."
The GPL applies to derivative works only when they contain elements of the original work, which is not my property. It is Linus's property or the FSF's property. Without the GPL, I have no license to distribute additional copies of their property at all. With the GPL, I have more rights to distribute derivative works than I did before.
The first two sentences of Section 5 state this explicitly. The GPL grants rights. It does not take any rights away. Without the GPL, I have no right to distribute the derivative work, because it contains a lot of Linus's code which I didn't write. With the GPL, I have a right that I didn't have before.
And the power of the GPL to do this is grounded in the copyright of the original author, not in some decision made by people who didn't write the code.
So, on to what "left" is. No one is forced to run OSS software, pay for OSS development, or contribute their own source code to OSS repositories. This makes it different from your National Health or our Social Security, where everyone with a job is forced to pay for a single system. OSS is more like a church, where anyone can start a church, and anyone can join and support whichever church they wish, or none at all.
Do you consider churches to be left-wing organizations? I don't. I do, however, consider them to be community institutions.
The "left" in "copyleft" is a pun on "right". Or do you think that only people on the political "right" can support "rights" such as free speech, free assembly, and universal voting?
I support copyright in the spirit it was created...
I suport copyrights in capitalist societies and also in non-capitalist societies. I do agree with you the standards for patents should be much more restrictive than copyrights. I feel very secure that when I write some code, I am not going to accidentally produce an exact copy of some Microsoft code that I have never seen. But I am not at all secure that I won't re-implement some IBM patent that I have never seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day of short stories, there was no Internet. There was much less television. There weren't any video games. There were plenty of movies, but they weren't big on special effects.
So if you were a geek in 1930, or 1960, what were you going to do for geeky entertainment? You were going to pull out a copy of Astounding or Galaxy for your geek media fix!
SF was driven by short stories and novelettes in those days. Asimov, Heinlein, Bester, Clarke, Ellison: they were all prolific story writers. Even the Foundation books were originally written for magazine publication.
Now this isn't the whole story, because science fiction itself went through some changes independent of the development of competing media (the New Wave of the 1960's). Also I think that American culture, at least, has become a lot more pessimistic and blase about science and the future.
But the media changes have had a large impact on the market for science fiction, and hence the nature of science fiction.
What about the code that The SCO Group knowingly distributed under the GPL, such as the entire Linux kernel? Do you believe that the SCO has abandoned all of its copyright interest in that code?
When I say "knowingly", I'm referring to the code that The SCO Group distributed after March 6, 2003. SCO certainly has actual knowledge of the contents of its own legal filings, so that constitutes knowledge of what's in the source code that SCO continued to distribute.
Seriously, I don't think the products and services side is going to last six months. I heard that Opinder Bawa left. I know for a fact that he sold all his stock, exercised all his options, and then sold that stock too. Do you have a new VP of engineering yet?
And as the products and services wither, it will become more and more obvious that SCO is just a lawsuit machine, which will make it more and more of a pariah in the IT world.
Well, pal, I get my data from sec.gov and provide links to the original data. You come in with a vague claim of "long and complex history" and no supporting data. If you think there's something incorrect about SEC's data, point it out.
Show me a link to a financial statement, on sec.gov or elsewhere, which shows The SCO Group making money.
I'll tell you the long and complex history. You used to work for a company known as the "Santa Cruz Operation". Then in August 2000 a company named "Caldera" bought out your major line of business, including the field offices and the employees in them. You work in Washington, as you mentioned elsewhere, which probably means that you transfered from "Santa Cruz Operation" to "Caldera".
Later on, in May 2003, "Caldera" changed its name to "The SCO Group". Meanwhile, the company formerely known as "The Santa Cruz Operation" changed its name to Tarentella.
So from your point of view, the "long and complex history" includes a transition from "Santa Cruz Operation" -> "Caldera" -> "The SCO Group". But from my point of view, it's pretty simple. The primary businesses of The SCO Group are to file lawsuits and fuck with Linux. The other business is a money-losing legacy Unix business with declining revenue.
You can't grow your way to profitability if you aren't growing, and SCO's Unix business is not growing.
Gosh, you can't even read to the end of the comment before jerking your knee, can you?
Just keep reading until you get to this part:
In fact it's such a stupid move that it makes wonder about conspiracy theories, like SCO's lawyers filed in the wrong court on purpose in order to add additional delay.
Prior to 1997, the company currently known as The SCO Group never reported a profit. Here's information from your S-1 registration
Began operations in 1994
Year ended 1995-10-31 revenue $0, net income ($1,350,000)
Year ended 1996-10-31 revenue $1,108,000, net income ($2,757,000)
Year ended 1997-10-31 revenue $1,117,000, net income ($8,148,000)
Year ended 1998-10-31 revenue $1,057,000, net income ($7,963,000)
Year ended 1999-10-31 revenue $3,050,000, net income ($9,367,000)
So who exactly is this "we" you are talking about? Because "your" company, The SCO Group, has had no profit in its entire history, except for the profit from the SCO Source program.
"Our core business has been profitable in the pas."
Okay, I'll bite (and politely, too). What business is "our core business", and during what time period has it been profitable?
Actually, IBM already won a round.
SCO sued IBM in a Utah state court, carefully writing their lawsuit so that there were no federal issues in it. SCO can do this because both SCO and IBM are both corporate residents of the same state, Delaware.
Or so SCO's lawyers said in their lawsuit. IBM slapped the fuck out of them by pointing out that IBM is incorporated in New York, and here is a certified copy of IBM's Certificate of Incorporation, and here's a bunch of legal precedents which say that a court has to recognize the actual state that a defendant is really in, not the state that the clot-headed plaintiff incorrectly writes in the complaint. Hence, because IBM and SCO are corporate residents of different states, a lawsuit between them for an amount greater than $75,000 must be heard in federal court, not in state court.
It was really a boneheaded move on the part of SCO's lawyers. Boies spent 10 years of his career working for IBM and he doesn't know what state it's incorporated in?! And none of their high-priced paralegals can read the first page of a 10-Q or a 10-K, the part that says:
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)
NEW YORK
(State of incorporation)
In fact it's such a stupid move that it makes me wonder about conspiracy theories, like SCO's lawyers filed in the wrong court on purpose in order to add additional delay.
As far as the federal judge assigned to the case, read the excellent Groklaw article on Judge Kimball.
Just because she married Bill doesn't immediately make this a freakin' conspiracy.
I agree. The world of high-tech is small and I'm willing to accept this as coincidence.
However, the fact that Microsoft wrote a check to SCO for $6 million does make this look like a conspiracy.
And the fact that Sun wrote a check to SCO, and Sun received an equity position in SCO, and Sun now loudly proclaims their products as legally compliant with SCO due to their 10-year old license -- but Sun does NOT talk about the license + stock warrant agreement they signed wit SCO in February 2003 -- looks even more like a conspiracy.
And Canopy+Center7 (another Canopy subsidiary) just settled a suit against Computer Associates for $40 million.
I am not a PR guy, but heck, this is Slashdot, none of us are very good at persuading people whose values are different from ours. So here goes: I think this would make a good PR meme: if you do business with a Canopy company, you have a high risk of getting sued. I would love to see that meme get some traction in the mainstream business press.
Indeed, SCO had revenue of $64 million for the year ended 2002-10-31 versus revenue of $40 million for the year ended 2001-10-31.
You omit to say that SCO made no profit on that revenue.
For the year ended 2001-10-31, SCO reported a net loss of $131 million. For the year ended 2002-10-31, SCO reported a net loss of $25 million.
To say that they are only alive by the licensing revenue provided by MS is misguided.
Don't confuse revenue with income/loss. A company doesn't survive very long by selling $64 million of products when they have $89 million in expenses.
Also, in August 2002, SCO hired Morgan Keenan to advise SCO on raising money through equity financing, debt financing, or mergers, acquisitions, or joint ventures. (I'm paraphrasing from the April 10-Q). That is SCO's recognition that SCO was running out of money last year. In the conference call for the April quarter, Darl McBride said that they no longer needed to raise money in the capital markets specifically because of the SCO Source license agreement.
SCO's 10-Q for April 30 states that they have only two customers for SCO Source (for that quarter). I think that's what Burrito Warrior was talking about.
That plus the fact that everything in SCO besides SCO Source is unprofitable.
Start here:
Income Statement for SCO Group Inc
There are a lot of numbers here. I'll summarize the ones that I usually look at: total revenue and net income.
Quarter ended 2002-07-31: revenue $15,384,000 income ($4,511,000)
Quarter ended 2003-10-31: revenue $15,468,000 income ($2,729,000)
Quarter ended 2003-01-31: revenue $13,540,000 income ($724,000)
Quarter ended 2003-04-30: revenue $21,369,000 income $4,500,000
Numbers in parentheses are negative.
Notice there are no numbers for 2003-07-31 yet. SCO hasn't filed those numbers officially with the SEC yet. But they have announced these numbers to the press.
Quarter ended 2003-07-31: revenue $20,100,000, net income $3,100,000
It looks like the management has really turned SCO around in the past two quarters.
The change is due to SCO's new "SCO Source" program. By digging into SCO's press releases and 10-Q's, I found that SCO Source had $8.25 million in revenue and $6 million in gross margin for 2003-04-30, and $7.3 million in revenue and $5.6 million in gross margin for 2003-07-31.
So let me restate those numbers above for SCO's two lines of business:
SCO Products and Services
Quarter ended 2002-07-31: revenue $15,384,000 income ($4,511,000)
Quarter ended 2002-10-31: revenue $15,468,000 income ($2,729,000)
Quarter ended 2003-01-31: revenue $13,540,000 income ($724,000)
Quarter ended 2003-04-30: revenue $13,119,000 income ($1,500,000)
Quarter ended 2003-07-31: revenue $12,800,000 income ($2,500,000)
SCO Source (customers: Microsoft and Sun)
Quarter ended 2003-04-30: revenue $8,250,000 income $6,000,000
Quarter ended 2003-07-31: revenue $7,300,000 income $5,600,000
Darl McBride says that SCO's core business is the products and services. You can see that the products and services are unprofitabe -- in fact, they have been unprofitable for every quarter of SCO's existence ever since they started business as Caldera. Even worse for SCO, the gross revenue from products and services is dropping.
Why does this matter? It matters because Kieran O'Shaugnessy, SCO's "man in Australia", said this (according to Groklaw):
"This IP battle is only one part of SCO's business and is an add-on component. The core of SCO's business is profitable."
Well, the core of SCO's business is not profitable, and SCO's core revenues are declining too. In fact, SCO Source is the only profitable division at SCO.
Caldera did file an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for $1.6 billion, and settled for $150 million (estimated).
It was consistently 0 for years. :P
:)
:)
Ummm, yeah, you got me there.
Insider sales were consistently zero for years up until Monday, March 10, 2003, when they started taking on high non-zero values that are inconsistent with the values before Monday, March 10, 2003.
SCO filed suit on Friday, March 7, 2003, and then the CFO started selling stock right after the weekend was over.
That better?
This is a delicate but important point.
SCO's claims against IBM are very public. The text of the lawsuit is available to anyone who is considering the purchase of SCOX stock. SCO even provides copies of much of that information on their own web site.
If some of the claims are grossly false, or baseless, that would be fraud. But it's not trading on material non-public information, because an investor can see what SCO is suing about before buying SCOX.
As far as their claims about Linux go, that's beyond my level of legal knowledge. It's certainly public knowledge that SCO plans to invoice Linux users; what the prices and terms of the license are; and so on. There is certainly "non-public information" about the actual content (if any) of their evidence. But it's quite public that SCO claims to have some evidence.
Interestingly, SCO has not filed a Reg FD form about their Las Vegas slide show. They probably should.
In an interview with CNET, SCO's new attorney said:
"The Canopy Group said SCO has got to hire somebody in-house to manage the IBM litigation,", Tibbits said.
Legal action hits SCO Web site
Sounds like a big pierce of the corporate veil to me.
If you look you'll see that the amount of stock trades by SCO execs has been fairly consistent for years ...
I'm calling you out, astro-turfer.
Sales of SCOX by insiders in calendar year 2001: 0.
Sales of SCOX by insiders in calendar year 2002: 0.
Sales of SCOX by insiders in 2003 before announcement of IBM lawsuit: 0.
My source: Company Information: SCO GROUP INC
"Fairly consistent for years?" Where the fuck is your source for that statement?
Note that the two transactions before the lawsuit are not sales; they are purchases -- by McBride -- at pre-lawsuit prices.
My guesses:
The Dell news is positive for SCO. Dell says they won't idemnify, which makes SCO look better.
Plus, the news about SCO's Las Vegas slideshow getting debunked didn't get much traction in the media. It got overshadowed by ESR talking about how an open-source partisan was doing illegal things to SCO's web site. That was really bad PR on Erics' part.
Plus a good old-fashioned short squeeze, led by that hedge fund which was buying shares. They seem to be through buying because the volume has dropped back down again.
Have a closer look at the intra-day chart. SCOX was actually up $1.25 in the morning and is drifting down and levelling out.
I am going to short when -- a bunch of good news (good for SCO that is) comes out and the stock goes down anyways. I might not be able to get in by then, but that's okay. It's much easier to ride a trend than to call a top.
You are right, fraud and insider trading are different things.
Fraud would be making knowingly false statements, like BRE-X and its gold mines.
Insider trading is defined as "trading on material non-public information". The essence of the crime is that the seller knows something important that the buyer does not know.
The "safe harbor" for SCO executives is that they irrevocably committed to sell this stock back in January, before the price went up. The weakness in their safe harbor is that they surely knew they were about to embark on a lawsuit and PR campaign. In my opinion the real evidence would be the timing they had on their negotiations with Microsoft and Sun to fund their anti-Linux campaign. After all, SCO already hired Boies back in January.
Now if a SCO executive had a 10b5-1 plan set up in, say, July 2001, they would have a much stronger position that they didn't know back in July 2001 SCO was gonna hire McBride, exit the Linux business, and enter the FUD business.
Here's some links about safe harbors:
Stock Trading Plans under Rule 10b5-1
SEC Regulations
Ooops, make that DCS-1000.
"Oversight" and "regulation" come down to this: government filters packets. Then they drop packets, arrest the senders and/or recipients of the packets.
It sounds like it's a great idea when the government filters packets that you don't like: spam, viruses, copyright infringing materials, decss, bomb-making instructions, child pornography, gay pornography, abortion literature.
Some people like some of those things. Too bad. The big illusion of government regulation is that the supporters think the government is going to regulate the way that the supporters think is good. But the government actually regulates in whatever way the government thinks is good, and the more power it has, the more it regulates. All of the material above has been the subject of government filtering already. And now the NY Times wants more.
I'd like to ask the New York Times how much "government oversight" they want to have on the content of their newspaper.
Still under a DDOS :P
:)
The Slashdotting will continue until the DDOS improves.
There is nothing in current or past SEC filings which suggests MS or Sun are supporting SCO.
... and it still doesn't work. You're full of shit. I busted your first post wide open with a direct link to sec.gov. Now I'm gonna bust your second post, too -- same 10-Q, same page.
There's no suggestion in the filings that either of those companies is paying SCO anything on an on-going basis.
"The two licensing agreements signed by us to date resulted in revenue of $8,250,000 during the April 30, 2003 quarter and provide for an aggregate of an additional $5,000,000 to be paid to us over the next three quarters."
Extra credit, since you can't read a 10-Q even after the link is shoved in your face:
"These contracts do not provide for any payments beyond 2003, except that Microsoft was granted the option to acquire expanded licensing rights, at its election, that would result in additional payments to us if exercised."
You're poorly informed. Sun confirmed that they are the first licensee here:
Sun expands Unix deal with SCO
There is nothing in current or past SEC filings which suggests MS or Sun are supporting SCO.
You're also a liar. I've got your SEC filing naming Microsoft right here.
SCO 10-Q
Page 21: "The second license was to Microsoft."
Unlike you, I actually bother to read what SCO reports.
No, if you actually read the GPL, you will see that all of my copyrighted work remains my work and I can license it on any terms I want. See section 2: "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works."
...
The GPL applies to derivative works only when they contain elements of the original work, which is not my property. It is Linus's property or the FSF's property. Without the GPL, I have no license to distribute additional copies of their property at all. With the GPL, I have more rights to distribute derivative works than I did before.
The first two sentences of Section 5 state this explicitly. The GPL grants rights. It does not take any rights away. Without the GPL, I have no right to distribute the derivative work, because it contains a lot of Linus's code which I didn't write. With the GPL, I have a right that I didn't have before.
And the power of the GPL to do this is grounded in the copyright of the original author, not in some decision made by people who didn't write the code.
So, on to what "left" is. No one is forced to run OSS software, pay for OSS development, or contribute their own source code to OSS repositories. This makes it different from your National Health or our Social Security, where everyone with a job is forced to pay for a single system. OSS is more like a church, where anyone can start a church, and anyone can join and support whichever church they wish, or none at all.
Do you consider churches to be left-wing organizations? I don't. I do, however, consider them to be community institutions.
The "left" in "copyleft" is a pun on "right". Or do you think that only people on the political "right" can support "rights" such as free speech, free assembly, and universal voting?
I support copyright in the spirit it was created
I suport copyrights in capitalist societies and also in non-capitalist societies. I do agree with you the standards for patents should be much more restrictive than copyrights. I feel very secure that when I write some code, I am not going to accidentally produce an exact copy of some Microsoft code that I have never seen. But I am not at all secure that I won't re-implement some IBM patent that I have never seen.