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."

Re:What? SCO needs money?

[spac3manspiff]

Or they can devote their efforts towards something productive. But that's too obvious.

Re:Perhaps

[AndroidCat]

Darl sued his last employer, so why not?

Re:What? SCO needs money?

[Ralph Yarro]

Surely there must be someone else they can sue.

Yes, we'll be suing Boies Schiller & Flexner next but don't tell them I said so.

Re:Has anyone managed to short SCO stock?

[sqlrob]

IIRC, something along the lines of 30% of the shares are shorted. That's a huge amount compared to what happens normally.

Unfortunately, I don't think Wall Street sees them as full of shit, otherwise the price of the stock would be much, much lower.

Re:uh huh..

[KiloByte]

Wrong. If a company dies, it's the stockholders who lose, not the management. The managers simply need to find a new job -- and note that even during the company's agony they still get paid in full. Their pay is also orders of magnitude bigger than those of a common employee.

At least put a link to the original of this

[iONiUM]

It's a bash [bash.org] quote in case you didn't already know.

Re:uh huh..

[twiddlingbits]

SCOX does not own the UNIX source code base as they want you to think. Novell owns most of it, IBM and others who have contributed to the various versions own the code they wrote. All SCOX may own is anything special that did for SCOs UNIX offering.

Re:Why is it still in court?

[k98sven]

But considering the length of time this has dragged on, the 900 million lines of code provided to them, and the fact that there has not been a single shred of evidence to date, why is this even still in court? How much money do you suppose this has cost IBM and tax payers so far?

Why is this still in court? Well, in part because the US legal system works at this speed. The average copyright case from filing to verdict is 2 years. And this is a larger-than average case.

It looks like this one will be resolved in 3-3.5 years.

SCO has a big pile of claims. IBM has a big pile of counterclaims. It's not just a question of the copyrights. SCO has contract claims too, IBM has licensing, trademark-infringement and patent counterclaims. And then there's the fact there's is a lot of code involved, with a lot of history behind it.

Add to that the fact that SCO has indeed been dragging their feet, and consistently been requesting more discovery.

Doesn't the court have some basic responsibility to IBM to end this case now that SCO has come up short?

That would be true if SCO had come up short. But in reality, the court hasn't determined that SCO has come up short. Yet. IBM filed for summary judgement and it was not granted. The case is still in discovery, and the court obviously felt it was more important to give SCO a long leash to produce anything it can during discovery, than it was to give IBM a quick trial.

Now, normally you would think SCO would put everything they had on the table in order to defeat the motion for summary judgement. They probably did, too, but the court decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and told IBM they could re-file their motion after the discovery phase is over. (When the court is certain it has all evidence in front of it)

Re:Another 3 points down...looong story

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the company was crooked long before pretty
boy floyd 'Darl McBride' took it over. Once upon
a time SCO was a good company named 'Santa Cruz Operation' that sold unix distros at a fair price
and ran a civilized marketing program. Then came linux and the bottom fell out of unix. This left the Santa Cruz boys up the creek without a paddle.
Eventually they sold out even though they were in the position to and could have easily reinvented their business as a services operation. Santa Cruz is a few miles south of San Jose near a valley full of majestic redwood groves. A really weird criminal named Kemper used to frequent there picking up female hitchhikers and leaving their heads in various places, but that johnny was eventually caught and put out of the public's misery.
Anyway, Santa Cruz Operation sold out to Ransom
Love and company who was then head of Caldera, a not so successful linux distro vendor whose distros had a nice loader program but a weak configuration. Seems that Caldera distros could not stand a power failure. Any power failure! At the first sign of a power failure or anything that even caused a machine reset, the installation would fail on a 'kernel panic', never to been seen or run again.....along with all the data that you put into it, for there was no provision to retrieve the trapped data as that would have required that the irretrievably broken system actually boot somehow if only to a console. Ransome knew that he did not have a product, but he and his company went through the motions. Just about that time linux got hot in the year before the dot bomb bubble burst. This rescued Ransome and his boys handily. They did not have to have
a product that was good. Their ole distro of 7
CD's that had the working install program was long gone by then. It had been replaced by the two CD program with the LISA loader that looked nice at first but failed as above described....On top whooeey but underneath phoooey! Now they could continue to market this failure to the public while they pushed the major effort to private investors in order to lure fodder for the bubble. It was here that Paul Allen, the fifty percent holder of Micro$$$$ stepped in with a controlling purchase of Caldera stock and he became the largest insider in the company. Allen WAS Caldera. In March of 2002 or so, Caldera went public with a closed stock offering. It opened at 8, and closed sales pushed up the price to 26 before the sales were opened to the public. Those public that had put in buy orders as soon as the stock was offered and hoped to buy in at 8 were cheated by the insiders who got there first. By the time the public got in, the stock was trading at its historical high. It went higher a little more for a few days on momentum. Then it started to fall. Those who hoped for riches from seeing how Red Hat skyrocketed after its IPO were not so easily disappointed and waited too long to sell.
I know. I was one of them. I lost 1200 dollars in this crooked scheme by Ransom Love and Paul Allen and others to defraud investors of millions. You see these 'good fellas' all had 'stock options' which as executives and major controlling stockholders they were able to vote about for themselves. That meant they could buy under option a stock worth, say 20 dollars, for the sum of one dollar. They could then sell this stock for the market price and make a real 'killin. This bunch had a lot of options and created a bear market in this stock. That bear was ravenousely hungry! The stock fell,,,and fell,,,,and fell worse than the crash of 1929-37. Over 98 percent of the valus of the stock was blown to the wind. In the process, all the public holders eventually sold for tremendous losses. At the end there was a small knot stubborn souls, but Ransom and Paul had a plan for them too. It was called a recombination. They did a 4 into one reverse split. This meant that if you held 4 shares, after the split you would hold one share. This redused the public's share even more. And there wer

Re:Whoa

[flosofl]

Except this is a civil matter, not a criminal one, and therefore a jury does not come into it

Wrong.

There are juries in civil suits, also. The number of jurors is different, however. I beleive instead of 12, as in criminal court, there are only 6. What your referring to is a bench trial, and that has to be specifically requested (and I've also only heard of those in regard to criminal proceedings). When the news talks about juries awarding astounding damage claims to plaintiffs, they are talking about juries in civil cases.

Right now, the case is still in discovery, so the jury hasn't even been selected yet.