Quote:
Originally Posted by tw
No one can fault management for doing what was required to meet a primary obligation - survive. I am not disputing that SCO could have won the case. That is completely irrelevant to everything I have posted. Notice what I keep saying: I have sympathy for SCO and their stockholders who were blindsided by a freight train that nobody could have seen coming. Management did what was necessary - and required - for interests of those that management works for - stockholders. If management had not done so, then management must be sued by the stockholders. And stockholders would have won.
|
Just because a case is not automatically thrown out does not mean it has real merit, only that it has met a very minimal standard. In a technically complex case, especially one where 'hundreds of lines' out of 'millions of lines' of code are involved, a judge would almost automatically have to allow the case to proceed since s/he would have no real mechanism for judging the merits. SCO's incredibly restrictive NDA would make if very difficult for the defense to find rebuttal experts, which might be one reason for the NDA.
If management of every troubled company followed the standard of feeling duty bound to pressing tenuous, if not outright frivolous, lawsuits as a last ditch effort to stave off disaster, the already overburdened legal system would grind to a halt. The only reason SCO was able to proceed with theirs was because of venture capital funding and selling shares publicly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tw
Did Caldera suddenly become wealthy from owning Unix? No. Again, without a legal victory, SCO's Unix ownership had near zero value. The stockholder's money spent to buy Unix only had value if SCO could win a lawsuit. SCO couldn't. No one can blame them for trying to save the company. They were only doing what all management in that position is required to do. As bad as you might think their actions, one must also have sympathy for them.
|
I can very well blame them for their method the same way I can blame a man who holds up a liquor store to pay for his child's medicine. The motive is not a justification of the act.
Considering your past views of management, you are being very sympathetic to a group of uber-MBA types who bought rights to a product they did not create and stretched those rights beyond what almost anyone else, including the people who sold them those rights, believed they had.
If I were to buy a Sekhem-Scepter at an auction, it wouldn't make me King of the Nile. Buying UNIX at the 'fire sale' does not automatically give SCO the right to assume that LINUX was infringing. SCO did not create the software, so it probably couldn't even determine that the software was original to UNIX.
After all these years, I still cannot find an independent verification for SCO's claim.
You are correct, though, TW. If management filed suit just to file suit, with no real expectation of winning, then they have at least won the battle. They temporarily drove the stock price of SCO up by at least a factor of twenty, and caused enough Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt among the business community to stall adoption of Linux, and made a few bucks along the way shaking down businesses.
The insiders have probably long since cashed out now and retired to a warm place which is unfortunately not Hell.