Final Judgment — SCO Loses, Owes $3,506,526 265
Xenographic writes "SCO has finally lost to Novell, now that Judge Kimball has entered final judgment against SCO. Of course, this is SCO we're talking about. There's still the litigation in bankruptcy court, which allowed this case to resume so that they could figure out just how much SCO owes, which is $3,506,526, if I calculated the interest properly, $625,486.90 of which will go into a constructive trust. And then there's the possibility that SCO could seek to have the judgment overturned in the appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court when that fails. Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more. Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
I for one (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't wait to hear the last SCO story. Barring appeals, I really hope this is it.
Enderle matters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone that would write an article extolling his Ferrari branded laptop and how the prancing horse logo adds raw ultimate power should never be taken seriously.
I guess some people do listen to that hack.
Well, perhaps a few less are listening to him now.
*shrug*
Isn't this just Novell's suit against SCO? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:3.5M? Oh noes... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure it does sting, considering they have spent quite a bit of that money on lawyers, corporate executive benefits, etc.
wht a mess our legal system is (Score:4, Insightful)
How much did it cost to defeat SCO and stop their nonsense? I'd be shocked if the legal bills on just the Novell/IBM side were under $10M.
The system worked once, at least in rendering the right decision. But few can afford to spend the amount of money this took.
yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
YAY! :D
Re:This is great news (Score:4, Insightful)
They're already trying. They're trying to switch to mobile phone apps, and unload the devastated and moribund server business. Darl seems to be trying to spin off the legal claims business into a separate patent troll or copyright troll company, to try and continue the FUD against Linux and open source that Microsoft kept them alive for.
Or did you think that $50 million from Microsoft that enabled them to continue the lawsuits was an investment in actual business?
Great news on a sad end! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's (apparently) easy to forget facts are facts (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Agreed - these tech pundits were complete tools. O'Gara was shallow enough to stalk Pamela Jones of Groklaw in 2005 and publish alleged photos of her apartment. Only Daniel Lyons (he of the Fake Steve) later admitted he was wrong [slashdot.org].
But this gets into a bigger pet peeve of mine: the tendency of people to disregard details in pursuit of what they wish were true. These pundits really wanted Linux to fail massively, either because their bread and butter was covering the developments of Microsoft and other proprietary OS vendors or because they equated Linux and free software with anti-capitalism. This led a lot of these shrills to cling to a very silly, unsubstantiated lawsuit long after it became clear that SCO had no concrete evidence to present in court and clearly hadn't thought through licensing considerations (BSD-licensed code in both Linux and System V, for example).
Many people really don't like delving into the details before forming an opinion and sticking to it. See also: religion, politics.
Re:Dear SCO, (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you for wasting five years of the Linux community's time and casting a shadow over the legitimacy of the world's countless open-source projects.
I think that was the point. B-(
(Or what became the point after they got caught in their own legal machine and people whose business models were threatened by Open Source saw the opportunity to hurt the competition by funding the suit to keep it alive. IMHO it started as a rent-seeking extortion scheme by people who bought into a dying company and picked the wrong victim.)
Re:Bailout (Score:3, Insightful)
Bush is dumb enough to grant SCO money for a bailout.
Re:Market Cap... (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't really mean anything. The market cap is often a useful proxy to the actual value of the company (because it reflects what the 'market' would pay for the entire company), but it isn't based on anything other than the share price. For a company like SCO, the share price doesn't mean a whole lot, as there isn't really a functioning market behind the quoted prices, just a smattering of transactions.
Re:Isn't this just Novell's suit against SCO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Darl belongs in jail... in addition to being stripped of his power.
Re:Is this truly the end? (Score:4, Insightful)
"a complete waste" (Score:5, Insightful)
whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste.
Ummmm, that $86 million was the best money MSFT spent since the $50,000 for QDOS. The chilling effect that the SCO suit produced for the Linux community was huge, and bought MSFT a lot of extra time. And you can't even begin to imagine the degree to which it has slowed innovation in IBM Software Group. IBM engineers can't post without 10 person-months of review from Legal.
Ding-a-ling (Score:3, Insightful)
Would that be jail time calling? Here's to hoping.
I want to know how much these pirates bilked Joe Investor for. Furthermore, I hope both IBM and Novell are interested in cooperating with bodies such as the SEC in holding SCO and Canopy management personally responsible for any and all wrongdoing, including both legal malpractice and stock manipulation, during the SCO race towards infamy.
Re:Isn't this just Novell's suit against SCO? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting. I see lots of comments (rightfully) condemning Darl, but no one ever seems to complain about Ralph Yarro any more. Which is a pity, because he was the one who picked Darl to carry this campaign out, is the biggest single SCO stockholder, and deserves even more come-back than Darl does.
(Heh. CAPTCHA was 'embezzle'.)
Re:This is great news (Score:3, Insightful)
"did you think that $50 million from Microsoft that enabled them to continue the lawsuits was an investment in actual business?"
It was not an investment; they *obviously were buying something extremely valuable from SCO.
It's a bit peculiar that *no *one *else seems to want to buy what SCO has, but MS works in mysterious ways, no?
All irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this matters: Darl McBride et al were still personally enriched by all this shenanigans, and they are all still alive and able to run off somewhere else and pull yet more shenanigans.
The bad CORPORATION was slapped, but its ORGANS still won and will get "transplanted" somewhere else. Until we get rid of the ethical shield that corporate law provides, people like this will still rule the roost.
Re:Speaking of losers... (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO in its day was very intimidating, with Darl Bride as an eloquent and persuasive spokesman. His pronouncements sounded factual and reasonable, until people like Groklaw looked behind the curtain and showed us the truth.
Sorry, but I think you and I have very different recollections of what happened.
Darl may have been eloquent - right up until he had to answer questions. But once he did, it was quite obvious that it was a scam.
For example, when he said that every Linux user owed him $699, the immediate question was "why? Where is the code?" His response was always "I can't show it to you."
You don't have to be a genius to understand that was an outright lie. If he can't show it to you, then you don't have to pay him. The excuse that they had NDAs that prohibited it was laughable. Any attorney who signed a deal saying that said that the company wasn't allowed to identify their own code, even if someone else made it publically available would be disbarred. It's just absurd.
Darl came across as a sleazy con-man. Persuasive he was not.
Re:This is great news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's NOT too bad about the engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the engineers did find jobs elsewhere. Those who remained did so despite salary cuts and other hardships, including the knowledge that basement-dwellers everywhere scorned them for their association with the corporate raiders and lawsuit-happy lawyers who had taken over the company.
Perhaps after having spent decades of their life putting heart and soul into something they were proud of, they were hoping against hope that it could be kept alive, instead of walking away and watching their legacy, the direct descendent of the original Bell Labs UNIX, get flushed down the toilet.
Not so fast (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:3.5M? Oh noes... (Score:3, Insightful)
"I am sure it does sting, considering they have spent quite a bit of that money on lawyers, corporate executive benefits, etc."
That's not the definition of "sting", if spending that money before the ship sank was one of the objectives in the first place. Companies aren't "people", they are an utterly expendable construct. Accomplish objectives, get paid, move on. A few million dollars seems like a lot to the peasantry, but for real players it's pocket money.
Re:All irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Errr... I should have been clearer: "... ethical shield that corporate law provides" should instead read "... ethical shield that corporate law and corporate hierarchy provides".
For the former, you might investigate Thom Hartmann's book "Unequal Protection". For the latter, consider the cliches about absolute power and corruption and the Peter Principle with a self-centric sinister twist: increasing ambition almost always leads to decreasing ethics. Those who get promoted or hired for the top ranks are usually the least ethical, as defined by the nature of the system. If we want better, we have to change the system, not waste time trying to find nonexistent better people within it. This is coincidentally just as true for the American electoral system and government, and why Obama will change nothing of any real and lasting significance. The only thing that will be recorded by history about this next Presidency will be that it marked the first time a non-Caucasian person performed the role.