Posted on 11/05/2004 9:03:07 PM PST by yhwhsman
SCO seals deal for legal expense cap
Published: November 5, 2004, 10:30 AM PST
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
The SCO Group has signed a previously announced agreement with two law firms that will cap legal expenses for its Linux and Unix litigation at $31 million, the company said in a legal filing Thursday.
The expense cap agreement--announced Aug. 31 but signed Oct. 31--puts to rest some uncertainty about the company's abilities to pay the hefty legal fees incurred through its legal attacks against IBM, Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler and its legal defense against Red Hat.
SCO's stock closed at $2.92 Monday, its lowest price since its legal attack began in March 2003, but jumped to $3.59 in trading Friday after the expense cap deal was disclosed. In a Monday report, Decatur Jones Equity Partners attributed the low stock price to the lack of an expense cap and to the continuing stock sell-off by investor BayStar Capital.
Under the agreement, SCO paid $12.6 million to the two law firms, Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Kevin McBride and Berger Singerman. And it will pay them $2 million per quarter for the next six quarters, beginning with the quarter that started Sept. 1 and ending with the quarter that starts Dec. 1, 2005, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The law firms will pay legal costs occurring after the six-quarter period, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said.
The law firms also will get a fraction of any money SCO receives as a result of its five legal cases. That payment will be made according to a sliding scale: 33 percent of any recovery up to $350 million, 25 percent of any recovery between $350 million and $700 million; and 20 percent of any recovery more than $700 million.
In addition, SCO already had paid $1.8 million to its law firms. And SCO agreed to put $5 million in escrow to pay for consultants, expert witnesses, and the law firms' out-of-pocket expenses.
I guess that makes it clear that the lawyers cannot submit their claims in bankruptcy court when SCO dies.
I've been watching the SCO debacle from the beginning. Too much info to detail here. Suffice it to say, IBM is going to eat them alive.
Credit must go out to the SCO CEO ...didn't take him long to destroy that co.
SCO should give it a rest.
I have used their products extensively in my IT career. They SUCK! The only thing worse than SCO products has to be BSD.
SCO UnixWare caused me so many headaches in my IT career. I'm still dealing with that garbage in several sites. Slowly, I'm replacing everything with pSeries running AIX.
Oh yeah! Unixware is unmitigated CRAP!
As the lead admin in a 24/7 datacenter, I was tasked to roll out 250 call telephony servers running U/W 7.0, after six months and untold amount of headaches, I told the Company CEO that we were NEVER going to get it running correctly, and SCO's service and support is the pits.
I have had far better results with HP-UX and AIX on RISC servers in a fault tolerant mission-critical environment.
Don't even get me started on early versions of Solaris.
I have a couple of processes I can run under either RH9 Linux or Cygwin.
They all run better under Cygwin. Something to do with how it handles threads, I think.
Uh huh.
I love Cygwin, and I have a slew of deployed redhat systems.
The stability of Linux is unsurpassed (well, except for mainframe stuff, which is my forte).
It needs better device support and a command line interface that humans can understand.
I don't have a problem with the Linux CLI - but I am an old Unix guy.
I agree with the device support comment, though.
I IPL'd (booted) an OS/390 test/backup image about seven months ago.
It's not doing much of nuthin, but it's still sitting there running. No intervention at all, for seven months.
I love the big iron.
Yep, mainframes DO have their plusses....
I, however, have a firewall that hasn't been rebooted since it was installed two years ago. (HP-UX on a L-class, running Checkpoint FW-1). I did have to clear out some old logs a few months ago, before the filesystem choked.
Groklaw's take on the matter is at:
SCO-Boies Fee Agreement and SCO Corrects Some SEC Filings
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041104173931772
And some comments from McBride at:
McBride on the Legal Cap ...
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041105143229594
MVS/OS390/z/OS was designed from the very beginning to be a multi-user multi-tasking environment.
MVS has the BEST task controller and dispatcher of any operating system in the world, zero wait states, 5 bubble levels of task abend control (and that's not counting the hardware error controls).
My machine has one gig of CS, 400 gig of disk, and comfortably supports over 100 concurrent users.
And it only runs at about 40 megahertz. The really big ones run at 40,000 megahertz.
Yeah...
While I agree with your basic premise, most business have neither the need or the budget for big iron.
I know. It is a fading environment. Too bad.
When IBM was first testing the T-Rex mainframe, it loaded it up with Linux images.
Each of the images was given some sort of non-trivial workload just to make it fair.
One IBM machine ran FORTY FOUR THOUSAND Linux images simultaneously.
You make my point: who in the world, besides governments and huge corporations, needs that kind of computing power?
In a certain way, I agree with you about the power.
But somewhere back in my caverns, I have an old 386 board I could hook up and try to run Windows/2000 on.
I can remember the old days when somebody would ask me for 100 meg on disk and I'd have to struggle for it.
With the DB's and DBMS's that are out there now, you need horsepower. Big time. Especially if you're stuck with Oracle and don't have DB2.
LOL!!!! Win2K on a 386! THAT's RICH!!!
Oracle IS a pig, but the BIG bottleneck usually isn't CPU cycles or RAM, it's disk space. However, a large mission critical Oracle DB usually has it's own pair of fault tolerant servers.
My cheepo $50K boxes are tied into a 2.2 million $$$ EMC SAN.
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