SCO Group sent Delisting Notice by NASDAQ

[tw]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

"You made a bad investment."

No court would accept that if management made no effort to protect the company's only asset. Every reasonable jury would have ruled 100% against SCO management if it had just given up.

Besides, the resulting lawsuits were necessary to establish the legality of a whole new business model. Sooner or later, someone was going to have to sue - as SCO did - to establish the legal credibility of that freeware Linux business model.

So who gets sued? Management and BoDs (individuals) - or business sues business. The later lawsuites were far more productive for America because it confirmed the integrity of the Linux business model.

Again, one can only have sympathy for SCO stockholders who did nothing wrong - were even using a well established and proven business model. What other industry was completely overturned by something so simple as Linux? None that I can think of.

Nobody can fault a company for doing what all companies and managements are required to do - survive. That requirement is a benchmark of all businesses. Even employees lives must be destroyed if necessary (ie firings) because even employees are secondary to that #1 principle - survive. SCO simply had little if any other options.

[richlevy]

TW, did you miss the part where Caldera, before they bought Unix from SCO, was a Linux distributor?

Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley release the Open Source Initiative Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint written as an amicus curae (friend of the court) brief in favor of IBM. The paper outlines some fundamental errors in fact and interpretation regarding SCO's ownership of Unix code, copyrights and other claims.

Also, it appears that SCO is reluctant to sow the code they allege is being infringed upon. How crazy is that for a lawsuit?

From here

SCO refuses to allow access to the samples of code containing the alleged copyright violations except under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). SCO's NDA would not only require that the signer keep confidential which lines of code SCO contested, but would also require that they hold confidential any information SCO told them, even if they already knew that information before being informed of it by SCO; all Linux kernel developers have considered this to be far too restrictive, so none of them have signed it. However, at SCO's annual reseller's convention in August of 2003 they revealed two short sections of code they alleged were copyright violations, and images of Darl McBride's presentation of this code were soon after published on German computer magazine publisher Heinz Heise's website. [4]
On May 30, 2003, SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride was quoted as saying that the Linux kernel contained "hundreds of lines" of code from SCO's version of UNIX, and that SCO would reveal the code to other companies under NDA in July. [5] To put this into context, David Wheeler's SLOCCount estimates the size of the Linux 2.4.2 kernel as 2,440,919 source lines of code out of over 30 million physical source lines of code for a typical GNU/Linux distribution. Therefore, as per SCO's own estimate, the allegedly infringing code would make up about 0.001% of the total code of a typical GNU/Linux installation. [6] SCO has since upwardly revised this figure to over a million lines of code, however. [7]

So when they are challenged on what they say, they change the story.

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by richlevy

So when they are challenged on what they say, they change the story.

Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust like tw.

[tw]

Originally Posted by richlevy

TW, did you miss the part where Caldera, before they bought Unix from SCO, was a Linux distributor?

Yes, but how is that relevant? I don't know how much Caldera spent, but SCO certainly never received anywhere near what was spent to buy Unix from AT&T. (BTW, that hyperlink only goes to a search page). Did Caldera suddenly become profitable because they owned Unix? Of course not. It was bought in a fire sale - probably so that Unix licensees could still obtain support.

Also, it appears that SCO is reluctant to sow the code they allege is being infringed upon. How crazy is that for a lawsuit?

I never followed it that far. Early on, SCO was desperately making personal appeals to major Japanese UNIX users using code copies to prove 'piracy'. Whether their case had merit was being lost upon me in the apathetic response. At that point, SCO's future (to me) looked dim.

Again, it matters little whether SCO's case was winnable. I am most certainly not making that claim - as implied by the above citations. SCO was in an unenviable position where SCO management had no options. Notice: no where do I defend the merits of SCO's case. Never once did I even try. If their case had zero merit, then it would have been thrown out of court. If SCO's case had enough merit to file, then SCO management had no choice but to file. Any case with only enough to maybe save the company - then they were obligated to file suit - even if SCO management regarded that lawsuit as frivolous.

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.

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. They had to file suit to survive - SCO management had no other option other than to lie down and be personally bankrupted by SCO stockholders.

As a guy named Tony once said, "Its only business".

[richlevy]

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.

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.

[tw]

Originally Posted by richlevy

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.

The management of SCO and probably every other company in SCO's situation may just agree with you. And yet they all have no choice. Lawsuits are that routine because none of those managements have a choice. If they file any case that only has enough merit to not be thrown out, then they must proceed with that lawsuit. The alternative is that any management that does not perform every legal act to promote their case - not matter how frivolous - must be sued by stockholders into bankruptcy.

Again, the principle is quite blunt. The company must do anything legal to survive. And yes, the courts are chock full of such cases as they have always been. I held evidence where one company patented how switches were pressed and responded to. I had to maintain code that showed I had programmed that more than ten years earlier. And the twist? Company that was doing the suing was also replacing me in the company that was being sued. Frivolous? Yes. These cases that frivolous - far more frivolous than SCO's case - are that routine.

Again, every SCO executive may agree with you 100%; their defense of Unix license was that frivolous. And again I use that phrase ... I have sympathy .... for SCO's management and stockholders. They were completely blindsided by Linux AND they had to do anything legal to save the company. They had no choice.

You may find it frivolous. But things far more frivolous have ended up in court. SCO had no choice. A company must do anything legal to survive. There is no way around that business principle. If SCO management did not file, then stockholders had every right to sue management.

More interesting is what SCO's president did in a desperate attempt to save his company. He spoke fluent Japanese. So he took source code into offices of major Japanese corporate presidents in a desperate attempt to convince Japanese corporate presidents that Linux was pirated code. If anyone could have made the case, SCO's president could have. Last I heard, Japanese response was apathetic. But again, SCO's president had no choice. He had to do anything so that SCO would survive as required of all corporate executives.

My sympathies for SCO manageent and stockholders. He was fighting an almost impossible task that no one ever saw coming. He was required to do that for his stockholders no matter how futile he perceived the fight. Stockholders were also blindsided by something completely unexpected. Notice THE fundamental phrase in my every post ... my sympathies for their 'no win' situation.