A Linux Nemesis on the Rocks (Business Week)

[Posted March 4, 2005 by corbet]

Business Week has a surprisingly complete article about the slow implosion of the SCO Group; it includes a report of today's announced restatement of SCO's 2004 numbers. "Well, 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."

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Mission Accomplished for the execs

Posted Mar 4, 2005 4:52 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (4 responses)

They were able to exploit litigation with groundless claims in order to levitate their stock far higher for far longer than would otherwise take place, KA-CHING! I have to hand it to them...the absurdly huge claims, the stalling, the demands for totally irrelevant documentation...its a textbook in stall tactics.

Then, after the stall...

Posted Mar 4, 2005 6:12 UTC (Fri) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] (3 responses)

...comes the long, painful spin into the deck. Pieces flying off the aircraft, windscreen coated with vomit, smoke and glycol trailing...

It should be quite spectacular.

The sad part is that the FUD won't all die with them. I would much rather have seen IBM encrater them.

Then, after the stall...

Posted Mar 4, 2005 13:43 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (2 responses)

The real question is if Darryl and our other favorite "upstandng citizens" will get out in time to have benefitted from the BS stock pumping without having to live through the crash....

I predict yes. That's how these games are played. Only a very few (like Martha Stewart) actually get caught at it. (And Martha went to summer camp and came out in better shape than she went in as a result.)

-Rob

Then, after the stall...

Posted Mar 4, 2005 14:49 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

My own opinion: as a stock scam, the whole SCO thing has not been all that successful. The amount of insider sales, while making up a nice bit of change, does not really add up to be enough to be worth a great deal of risk, once you split it among the relevant parties. Darl has, I believe, still not sold any stock at all.

Now, Canopy has managed to extract some value by way of the Vultus deal and such. And Darl got that nice $1m paycheck. But the payday they were evidently hoping for has not happened for them.

Then, after the stall...

Posted Mar 4, 2005 18:27 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

The Vultus deal was a shameless scam. Talk about printing money. I'm glad the keen eye of the editor has not overlooked that facet of the SCO tragedy.

For those of you following along at home, SCO issued $3 million in new SCOX shares to buy a totally unrelated Canopy-owned company called Vultus, which also happened to already be in the same building as SCO. The cover for this transaction was provided by a stillborn SCO product called, quite unimaginatively SCOx. The punchline is that Canopy group managed to extract $3m in cold hard cash without selling its own SCO shares.

A Linux Nemesis on the Rocks (Business Week)

Posted Mar 6, 2005 8:25 UTC (Sun) by jtjammer (guest, #16102) [Link] (1 responses)

With the stock so cheap, maybe the Linux community should buy it out and put things right ourselves.
OSS the code, drop the suits, and fire the other suits. ;~)
Thoughts?

A Linux Nemesis on the Rocks (Business Week)

Posted Mar 10, 2005 10:20 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

Stupid idea. incredibly stupid idea.

You can only buy SCO by offering more than they are currently priced at. Doing so would mean the people currently holding SCO-stock gets a profit, relative to what they'd otherwise get.

In reality, assuming their case doesn't hold water (which I think is quite obvious by now if it wasn't since the start) the real value of SCO is unquestionably negative. If they loose, they will be bankrupt, there is no way they can affort to pay the counter-claims.

Indeed it may even be that they avoid a few counter-claims for the simple reason that there's not much point to suing a company that can't pay you what they owe even if you win.

No, we want SCO to go out with a loud bang. The kind of bang that says: People who where stupid enough to let these kind of people borrow their money (i.e invested in SCO) will loose every cent of it. To top it off I'd like to see criminal proescution for some of the principals too.

Financial markets have long memories. The next time some company comes along with a business-model consisting of suing OSS-software with lofty claims and little evidence people will remember what happened last time.

At this point, being bougth out would count as a definite win for SCO. Buying them to get rid of a problem is admitting that there was a problem to begin with. There never was. SCO never was anything more than hot air.

A Linux Nemesis on the Rocks (Business Week)

Posted Mar 10, 2005 19:33 UTC (Thu) by rgoates (guest, #3280) [Link]

As I recall, the Business Week article went along with the notion that SCO has significant intellectual property in UNIX. The article ignored Novell's claims regarding that issue, so it wasn't totally clueful. Still pretty good, though, and interesting.