Posted on 04/04/2005 7:34:45 PM PDT by Nick Danger
It's beginning to look like the SCO-IBM case won't make it to the finish line, an end to discovery and summary judgement.
SCO's sponsors are blowing up. Literally.
Maureen O'Gara (left), whose name is like fingers rubbing a balloon to most in the open source community, and is regularly accused by them of being an SCO shill, reported last month that both Ray Noorda's daughter and another executive with Canopy Group, SCO's largest owner, committed suicide.
More telling, perhaps, was her reference to SCO itself, a company she has regularly defended on teleconferences. She called it "the infamous SCO Group."
When your shark-jumper jumps ship, who's left?
The real news from last month is that Canopy's position in SCO has transferred to former Canopy CEO Ralph Yarro, who chairs the SCO board. When the former VC leaves his firm and becomes your CEO, you've got no net below you and (most likely) no new money coming in the door.
SCO could use new money, because when it finally delivered its financial results for fiscal 2004 (on April Fool's Day no less) it had a net loss of $23.3 million on revenue of $42.8 million, against profits of $5.4 million and $79.2 million in revenue. Why? Because sales of licenses to Linux users totaled just $809,000, down from $25.8 million in 2003.
How can this be bad news for open source?
Simple. If SCO fails to make it to the end of discovery, the judge in the case can't set a precedent that will keep others from trying the same con.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
We still have liberals, and Dana is still out there writin' stuff. Some things never change. |
> How can this be bad news for open source?
> Simple. If SCO fails to make it to the end of
> discovery, the judge in the case can't set a
> precedent that will keep others from trying the
> same con.
That assumes that there won't be other consequences
that would act as a deterrent for similar content-free
legal efforts, like criminal referrals, SEC actions, etc.
Furthermore, SCO can abandon their own actions, but
they would then face likely default judgements in the
RedHat case, and in the IBM counterclaims. Either could
generate precedents.
In any event, SCO's claims triggered a tremendous
amount of research into the provenance of Linux. Anyone
else who cares to take a shot at it now knows they face
an opponent that has done its homework.
Some observers think that SCO will run out of cash this
year. They (NASDAQ sym SCOXE) are also on the edge of
being delisted for tardy financial reporting.
For all the available legal documents, and mostly-
open-source-biased analysis, see:
http://www.groklaw.net
Well, it sets an INFORMAL precedent, in that it shows that suing your own customers is a bad business plan.
OMG, you remember "The Source"!
I used it in a demo to a regional bank. Tried to sell them the concept of online banking in the future for their select customers with something we humbly called their "Access Card."
The Source had stock info and various calculations and a minimalists online chat-thingy. I was blown away once at 3 a.m. by a page from a Radio Shack salesman demonstrating it to a customer. "You're in Perth???"
Oh, and the bank passed on the pitch.
I've never posted this online before because i was asked not to for fear of it tracking back. Someone close to me worked for SCO for many years but has now been fired. Everyone in the company who wasn't part of the management clique was fired. The management cliques at each office no longer have any work, and sit on their butts all day sending out resumes. They also lost some of their last remaining benefits. They then rehired the fired long time employees as temps with no benefits, to maintain the few remaining support contracts on platforms that aren't being actively managed. There are ex-SCO employee support groups for networking and such, that have websites where this is further detailed first hand by those who worked for combined hundreds or thousands of manhour years for the company. The lives of hundreds of families were ruined because of the greed of these men.
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I would like to salute author Dana Blankenhorn for still being around. "DANA," as he was known to me then, was the House Liberal on a discussion board called "Participate," on what I think was the first on-line service in the U.S., "The Source" in McLean, VA. We battled many an evening over our acoustic 300-baud modems, me on an Atari 800, and I don't know what he had. To think this was 25 years ago.