The paper that this article is linking to was actually written in June 1993, as the version on the author's own site shows.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting paper, because the author went to extraordinary efforts to make sense of the literary criticism, instead of just shallowly dismissing it all as jargon.
Professionals don't care how cool a technology is or how miserable SCO's actions are, they care about the changes in future revenue this could cause, how far that revenue is in the future, the risk associated with achieving that financial goal and the different profit scenarios associated with each level of risk.
I think you're omitting one factor here which in reality probably dominates investment thinking: The probability that the investor will be able to sell the stock for more than they bought it (a.k.a. "finding a bigger fool"). All of the factors you cited are, to a professional investor, ultimately only proxies for that consideration.
The GPL has never been tested in court
But the GPL ultimately relies on fairly standard theories of what intellectual property can be protected by copyright (and considerably less ambitious theories than many commercial licenses).
If you believe in the possibility of the GPL being overturned in court, you're better off investing in gold than in SCO stock, because if the GPL were to be found unsound, anarchy would break out all over IP licensing.
That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out.
That's where the beauty of the Open Source model comes into play: At the rates that SCO wants to charge, it would be far cheaper for many companies to hire some top developers to speed up the development of the patch, and as soon as one company does this, the patch is out there.
In fact, SCO's 'public letters' could all be a smoke and mirrors game, and the code they've released so far to endless ridicule here on/. could be a ruse to make the linux community overconfident and not look as closely as they should.
SCO is a publicly traded company. Using a ruse of this magnitude would almost certainly be a criminal offense against securities law.
But you're missing the point, you're talking about people who have made a LOT OF MONEY investing in companies, it's what they do.
What they mostly do is invest other people's money and live off the fees, win or lose.
If SCO was just smoke and mirrors don't you think some analysts would be crying that? Surely at least one arbitrage firm would be setting up a short position (and yes you can do short positions while mitigating your upside risk). But I don't see any of that
How hard have you been looking?
Yahoo says:
Short % of Float (as of 8-Dec-03): 27.44%
27% is an ENORMOUS short percentage, and the number of shares short was up 25% over the previous month and more than 100% over the previous two months. Presumably, January numbers will be out soon, and they will bear watching.
SCO isn't in the same situation as the internet bubbles
The one unchanging element in each bubble have been the investment analysts arguing that the situation was different from any previous bubble:-)
That's under $.25 per track, for MP3s with NO DRM. A better (legal) deal cannot be had. Plus, it has lots of independent stuff not found elsewhere.
All true, but their material can be quite uneven and they tend not to have big-name artists (or only early recordings that were buried in record labels' vaults for very good reasons). Therefore, the attraction of eMusic was the possibility of downloading stuff speculatively, without thinking of a ticking download meter.
Nevertheless, I was willing to give them a chance to show what they could do under the new model. However, downloads (which already lost considerably in reliability and convenience when they switched to their proprietary download manager earlier this year) have turned to complete garbage since their announcement. It takes dozens of restarts to get a download now, and sometimes the download is falsely reported as correct when in fact a zero length or truncated file was downloaded.
Under these circumstances, I don't see much of a future for my eMusic subscription, or for eMusic, for that matter.
Do you really think that 40 years ago, when the FCC actually (correctly) enforced the spirit instead of the letter of their guidelines and regulations, that we had this same issue? History tells us that this was not the case.
I wouldn't know about history, but here's some anecdotal evidence that would lead me to believe otherwise:
DEAR ABBY: I will be 79 in a few weeks and recently received notice of my 60th high school reunion. I was an outstanding beauty when I was 18, but now I have thinning hair and gravity has taken its toll on me.
I grew up in a small town outside of Boston and was one of a class of 160 students. I was extremely promiscuous back then. I slept with more than two-thirds of the boys in my class -- and everyone knew it.
Wow! And all without the benefit of Internet served feelthy pictures!
[...] it has caught snowflakes of Sulfur Dioxide as it flew through the plume of an erupting volcano on Io, snapped pictures of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it smashed into Jupiter's atmosphere
Yes, but what about the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and the C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate?
Unfortunately, the headlines seem to vastly overstate the success of the investigation so far. "Tracing" the virus to a hacked computer and a stolen credit card does not really establish the real "Origin" of that virus.
I'll be satisfied with the investigation when I see a picture of the person who wrote it (preferably in a body bag, with the fingernails ripped out & a broom handle sticking from his/her ass).
Interesting thoughts here, but I don't agree that electricity is a "completely inelastic commodity". Californians were able to save a surprisingly large amount of power with relatively simple changes during the electricity crisis.
One of the major points he made before he left, and somewhat adamantly at that, was that software is so poor in quality nowadays because developers don't really bother to come up with formal proofs of correctness for their programs.
Evidence that Dijkstra was not particularly in touch with what most software nowadays is about. It's not that it's fundamentally impossible to prove a large program correct, i.e., prove that its postcondition follows from its precondition, but that for many programs, coming up with those postconditions would be an enormous development effort itself.
Like many mathematicians, Dijkstra seems to have had a somewhat overy optimistic view of the susceptibility of mathematical reasoning to bugs in itself. I believe that in the general case, the proof for a program will be larger than the program itself, and will be written in a language that is more complex, has poorer abstraction capabilities, and less machine support than the programming language of the program. It would stand to reason that the proof would have at least as many bugs as the software.
He may or may not be right about that, but then, on the other hand, a computer scientist who doesn't use computers (like Dijkstra writing his journal and reportedly also his papers by hand) is somewhat like an astronomer who doesn't use telescopes.
And, not unsurprisingly, The Fish is wrong in this context. Apercu here means an insight, a discerning perception.
The credulity with which people accept translations done by Babelfish & Co. at face value never ceases to fill me with a mixture of ennui and schadenfreude.
Interestingly enough, that very first bug report demonstrates a limitation in the logical reasoning of the analysis tool, not a defect in the Apache code:
current_provider was assigned from conf->providers (line 257), so it cannot possibly be NULL unless conf->providers is NULL, and that condition is tested for on line 287.
I wouldn't mind Outlook viruses and worms so much if they were really confined to Outlook (Evolution in Action & all that). However, they are putting a serious strain even on non-Outlook, non-Windows users.
I've never run Windows in my life, and I've never used Outlook or Entourage as my e-mail client. Last week alone, SpamAssassin caught close to 60 megabytes of spam in one of my accounts, the bulk of which was at least 649 windows viruses (I just counted messages identified by SpamAssassin as WINDOWS_EXECUTABLE). I also got several 100 bounce messages for viruses with my name forged as the sender.
What gives Microsoft the right to infest the world with mail clients that are so broken that even those who don't use them spend 60M of disk space and one hour of time a week just to clean up behind the crap they generate?
The AT&T vs BSD lawsuit introduced enough FUD and left a big enough cloud over BSD to drive commercial users away from BSD and make vendors license SysV "just to be safe". Even a strong BSD varient like the orginal SunOS has been supplanted by a SysV varient Solaris. I suspect that one of Sun's reasons in switching to SysV was to avoid legal issues, in addition to getting the "newer and improved" features of SysV.
Sun's switch to System V predated the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit by several years, and I'm fairly certain (although I have never worked for either of the two companies) that Sun had an AT&T UNIX license years before switching to System V, as that was typical for Unix vendors back then (I vaguely recall AT&T copyrights scrolling by on SunOS 3.2 startup).
Yeah, right.. two words for you; "Bittersweet Symphony". A few seconds of sampling in a Verve song, and 100% of the royaties gets awarded to the Rolling Stones. Fair use is dead and buried.
I've read this claim a couple of times on Slashdot, and I'm puzzled. The ENTIRE tune of "Bittersweet Symphony" was lifted from a Stones song (The lyrics, admittedly, were original). This was far beyond what any reasonable person could consider fair use.
Maybe in the long run, OpenBSD is better off without the DARPA money. As David L. Parnas wrote in his 1987 paper SDI: A Violation of Professional Responsibility:
I also agree with Professor Janusz Makowski of the Technion Institute, who wrote in the Jerusalem Post: "Overfunded research is like heroin, it leads to addiction, weakens the mind, and leads to prostitution." Many research fields in the United States are now clearly overfunded, largely because of DoD agencies. I believe we are witnessing the proof of Professor Makowski's statement.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper that this article is linking to was actually written in June 1993, as the version on the author's own site shows.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting paper, because the author went to extraordinary efforts to make sense of the literary criticism, instead of just shallowly dismissing it all as jargon.
Professionals don't care how cool a technology is or how miserable SCO's actions are, they care about the changes in future revenue this could cause, how far that revenue is in the future, the risk associated with achieving that financial goal and the different profit scenarios associated with each level of risk.
/. could be a ruse to make the linux community overconfident and not look as closely as they should.
:-)
I think you're omitting one factor here which in reality probably dominates investment thinking: The probability that the investor will be able to sell the stock for more than they bought it (a.k.a. "finding a bigger fool"). All of the factors you cited are, to a professional investor, ultimately only proxies for that consideration.
The GPL has never been tested in court
But the GPL ultimately relies on fairly standard theories of what intellectual property can be protected by copyright (and considerably less ambitious theories than many commercial licenses).
If you believe in the possibility of the GPL being overturned in court, you're better off investing in gold than in SCO stock, because if the GPL were to be found unsound, anarchy would break out all over IP licensing.
That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out.
That's where the beauty of the Open Source model comes into play: At the rates that SCO wants to charge, it would be far cheaper for many companies to hire some top developers to speed up the development of the patch, and as soon as one company does this, the patch is out there.
In fact, SCO's 'public letters' could all be a smoke and mirrors game, and the code they've released so far to endless ridicule here on
SCO is a publicly traded company. Using a ruse of this magnitude would almost certainly be a criminal offense against securities law.
But you're missing the point, you're talking about people who have made a LOT OF MONEY investing in companies, it's what they do.
What they mostly do is invest other people's money and live off the fees, win or lose.
If SCO was just smoke and mirrors don't you think some analysts would be crying that? Surely at least one arbitrage firm would be setting up a short position (and yes you can do short positions while mitigating your upside risk). But I don't see any of that
How hard have you been looking?
Yahoo says:
Short % of Float (as of 8-Dec-03): 27.44%
27% is an ENORMOUS short percentage, and the number of shares short was up 25% over the previous month and more than 100% over the previous two months. Presumably, January numbers will be out soon, and they will bear watching.
SCO isn't in the same situation as the internet bubbles
The one unchanging element in each bubble have been the investment analysts arguing that the situation was different from any previous bubble
MP3.com wasn't going to work either, remember?
And, ultimately, I guess, it didn't work.
*The "Sticky Fingers" Warhol cover with real zipper [...]
Don't forget the "Peelable Banana" Velvet Underground Warhol cover.
And that's all great stuff! Perfectly do-able with CD's if you wanted to do it.
Well, designing a jewel case with a working zipper might be a bit of a technical challenge...
The only way another moon trip is worth the expense is if it's one way and Bush is a passenger.
On the hubr-o-meter, this does not quite measure up to O'Reilly publishing a book The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog.
Admittedly, they published it in 1992...
That's under $.25 per track, for MP3s with NO DRM. A better (legal) deal cannot be had. Plus, it has lots of independent stuff not found elsewhere.
All true, but their material can be quite uneven and they tend not to have big-name artists (or only early recordings that were buried in record labels' vaults for very good reasons). Therefore, the attraction of eMusic was the possibility of downloading stuff speculatively, without thinking of a ticking download meter.
Nevertheless, I was willing to give them a chance to show what they could do under the new model. However, downloads (which already lost considerably in reliability and convenience when they switched to their proprietary download manager earlier this year) have turned to complete garbage since their announcement. It takes dozens of restarts to get a download now, and sometimes the download is falsely reported as correct when in fact a zero length or truncated file was downloaded.
Under these circumstances, I don't see much of a future for my eMusic subscription, or for eMusic, for that matter.
As far as I've read, the Beatles are unwilling to offer their music on any legal online service.
I wouldn't know about history, but here's some anecdotal evidence that would lead me to believe otherwise:
Wow! And all without the benefit of Internet served feelthy pictures!
Would that be Torvlad the Implementer?
[...] it has caught snowflakes of Sulfur Dioxide as it flew through the plume of an erupting volcano on Io, snapped pictures of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it smashed into Jupiter's atmosphere
Yes, but what about the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and the C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate?
Time to die
I'd be interested in hearing the original music that's "just like" the Eigenradio
Lou Reed, "Metal Machine Music"
That documentary was probably sponsored by the rat breeding industry to protect the interests of big international rat production companies.
Unfortunately, the headlines seem to vastly overstate the success of the investigation so far. "Tracing" the virus to a hacked computer and a stolen credit card does not really establish the real "Origin" of that virus.
I'll be satisfied with the investigation when I see a picture of the person who wrote it (preferably in a body bag, with the fingernails ripped out & a broom handle sticking from his/her ass).
Interesting thoughts here, but I don't agree that electricity is a "completely inelastic commodity". Californians were able to save a surprisingly large amount of power with relatively simple changes during the electricity crisis.
One of the major points he made before he left, and somewhat adamantly at that, was that software is so poor in quality nowadays because developers don't really bother to come up with formal proofs of correctness for their programs.
Evidence that Dijkstra was not particularly in touch with what most software nowadays is about. It's not that it's fundamentally impossible to prove a large program correct, i.e., prove that its postcondition follows from its precondition, but that for many programs, coming up with those postconditions would be an enormous development effort itself.
Like many mathematicians, Dijkstra seems to have had a somewhat overy optimistic view of the susceptibility of mathematical reasoning to bugs in itself. I believe that in the general case, the proof for a program will be larger than the program itself, and will be written in a language that is more complex, has poorer abstraction capabilities, and less machine support than the programming language of the program. It would stand to reason that the proof would have at least as many bugs as the software.
He may or may not be right about that, but then, on the other hand, a computer scientist who doesn't use computers (like Dijkstra writing his journal and reportedly also his papers by hand) is somewhat like an astronomer who doesn't use telescopes.
And, not unsurprisingly, The Fish is wrong in this context. Apercu here means an insight, a discerning perception.
The credulity with which people accept translations done by Babelfish & Co. at face value never ceases to fill me with a mixture of ennui and schadenfreude.
Interestingly enough, that very first bug report demonstrates a limitation in the logical reasoning of the analysis tool, not a defect in the Apache code:
current_provider was assigned from conf->providers (line 257), so it cannot possibly be NULL unless conf->providers is NULL, and that condition is tested for on line 287.
NEXT!
I wouldn't mind Outlook viruses and worms so much if they were really confined to Outlook (Evolution in Action & all that). However, they are putting a serious strain even on non-Outlook, non-Windows users.
I've never run Windows in my life, and I've never used Outlook or Entourage as my e-mail client. Last week alone, SpamAssassin caught close to 60 megabytes of spam in one of my accounts, the bulk of which was at least 649 windows viruses (I just counted messages identified by SpamAssassin as WINDOWS_EXECUTABLE). I also got several 100 bounce messages for viruses with my name forged as the sender.
What gives Microsoft the right to infest the world with mail clients that are so broken that even those who don't use them spend 60M of disk space and one hour of time a week just to clean up behind the crap they generate?
The AT&T vs BSD lawsuit introduced enough FUD and left a big enough cloud over BSD to drive commercial users away from BSD and make vendors license SysV "just to be safe". Even a strong BSD varient like the orginal SunOS has been supplanted by a SysV varient Solaris. I suspect that one of Sun's reasons in switching to SysV was to avoid legal issues, in addition to getting the "newer and improved" features of SysV.
Sun's switch to System V predated the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit by several years, and I'm fairly certain (although I have never worked for either of the two companies) that Sun had an AT&T UNIX license years before switching to System V, as that was typical for Unix vendors back then (I vaguely recall AT&T copyrights scrolling by on SunOS 3.2 startup).
Yeah, right.. two words for you; "Bittersweet Symphony". A few seconds of sampling in a Verve song, and 100% of the royaties gets awarded to the Rolling Stones. Fair use is dead and buried.
I've read this claim a couple of times on Slashdot, and I'm puzzled. The ENTIRE tune of "Bittersweet Symphony" was lifted from a Stones song (The lyrics, admittedly, were original). This was far beyond what any reasonable person could consider fair use.
$3000 a year, hmmm $300 a month for "unlimited" MP3 downloads? Sounds like a marketing campaign!
Sounds like iPod marketing: "A thousand CDs - out of your pocket"
Could you perhaps share with the rest of us this "indisputable" evidence?
"indisputable" in this context probably means that those trying to dispute the evidence risk sharing a cell with Mr. Hawash soon thereafter.