McBride At A Loss For Words 292
An anonymous reader writes "That, at least is the verdict of Linux Business Week's Maureen O'Gara, who reports that, with all the latest twists and turns, with BayStar and RBC in particular, SCO's CEO was finally bereft of words to describe what it's all been like. In the end he settled for 'This is like...nothing.' As O'Gara herself says, the latest SCO news is plain weird."
Hah. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe he shouldn't have used them all up before.
Re:Hah. (Score:5, Funny)
other peoples words are derivative works of Darl's (Score:4, Funny)
other peoples sentences are just his words rearranged in a different order. they are obviously DERIVATIVE WORKS of his sentences. some sentences have had the words purposely REARRANGED to OBFUSCATE the true origin of the sentence - Darl. in fact, sometimes the senteneces other people have said are EXACTLY THE SAME are Darl's sentences. word for word. coincidence?
a bunch of MIT rocket scientists have confirmed that Darl's sentence "yes." has been used elsewhere MILLIONS of times. this is STEALING of his IP and it must stop. sue Darl sue!
hint to Darl: when you sue remember that (like with the IBM lawsuit) you can pick whatever value you want for damages! rather than sue for an obscenely ridiculous value like 5 Billion dollars you should really go all out this time and sue for 100 GaZillion (GaZillion - copyright Darl McBride) dollars! just think how that will make the stock price in your stock scam to go up. wow! is our legal system cool or what?
Re:Hah. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hah. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe he shouldn't have used them all up before.
This is probably a good thing. In fact, as it presently stands Darl could teach a thing or two about not running your mouth off unnecessarily to a certain [infoworld.com] other [computerweekly.com] proprietary [sdtimes.com] Unix [java.net] company [nwsource.com].
Re:Hah. (Score:5, Funny)
Not that he necessarily needs religious salvation, but... is there a trace of Zen in that quote?
Re:Hah. (Score:5, Funny)
Asked by Zaphod Beeblebrox if he was responsible, Arthur replies "Oh, it was nothing". The entire crew take his statement literally and continue on with their previous conversation; much to Arthur's annoyance.
Perhaps Darl's wearing his DuoGenta, Superchromatic, Pyro-sensitive sunglasses, which have just turned black.
Re:Hah. (Score:3, Funny)
"This is like...whoah."
Where's the story? (Score:3, Interesting)
surprisingly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:surprisingly (Score:5, Interesting)
It is an opportunity, if you realize it is insanely overpriced right now, and will only go down in the future. Never mind that you are going to loose money by selling the stock at a lower price than you bought it for; they are selling it at the highest price it will ever be in the future. This is their best opportunity to minimize their losses.
The backers are getting out. Watch SCO burn...
RTA, Baystar aren't selling anymore.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Baystar are not selling their shares right now - they just doubled their stock by buying the 20,000 shares that the Royal Bank of Canada just cashed out of.
Re:RTA, Baystar aren't selling anymore.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The stock only ever crawled out of the sewers based on the hype from their FUD; when the FUD is finally fully abated, it's probably heading right back down there once more...
Baystar isn't buying ordinary shares... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes but Baystar is not buying the currently-$5-and-dropping publicly traded shares. Baystar is buying 20,000 Series A shares worth $1000 each. Now the interesting part is that if SCO is forced to redeem these special stocks, Baystar gets considerably more than the $1000 per share because of the penalty clause - I think it's a 20% premium, so make that $1200 per share. So Baystar is unlikely to be out of cash if SCO is forced to re-imburse it. In fact Baystar will be up $8 million dollars on their holding of 40,000 Series A shares.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
a thought I had last week... (Score:3, Interesting)
we all know that RBC took a bath on the shares they converted at 13.50 per, (a loss of ?60? percent) but we do NOT know at what price they sold their premium 20k shares to baystar at.
if baystar made guarantees to RBC before the inital purchase of the 30 mill$us of stock, it's very possible, they sold their 20k shares for the amount they lost on the conversion, and no one is talking about it.
do you know, does anyone, that they sold their 20 million dollar inve
Re:surprisingly (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like they sell anything to make a profit.
Re:surprisingly (Score:3, Insightful)
'This is like...nothing.' (Score:5, Funny)
Yah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yah (Score:5, Funny)
It was a really good business plan, too...
SCOX price right now... (Score:3, Informative)
FP?
Re:SCOX price right now... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SCOX price right now... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just wondering what a slashdotting of this stock might look like
I mean everybody on /. shorting this stuff..
..should be interesting..
Re:SCOX price right now... (Score:2)
Well, OK, I'm not too proud to admit I wouldn't have bought it last year and sold during autumn, when it started going down from the $22 high in July, but I think many of us have a little more dignity than that, garg. =)
Re:SCOX price right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Great plot from a previous /. post (Score:5, Funny)
Original post with this plot is here [slashdot.org].
Re:Great plot from a previous /. post (Score:3, Funny)
That adds more meaning to the phrase "rock bottom."
Re:Great plot from a previous /. post (Score:3, Funny)
If you look at the far right side of the rock, I guess we know how this all ends.
Re:Great plot from a previous /. post (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great plot from a previous /. post (Score:3, Funny)
Stop reporting it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop reporting it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop reporting it (Score:5, Insightful)
well they're not thriving anymore. It's kind of sad really, SCO use to be contender.Don't they have a spot secured on the UNIX timeline along with ATT and the others somewhere? Too bad mgmnt/greed/stupidity/etc got in the way. oh well, you know what they say, out with the old in with the nucleus.
Re:Stop reporting it (Score:5, Informative)
In this case, very literally out with the old. This company isn't the historical SCO at all, but rather an offshoot of the Linux company Caldera, renamed to SCO after buying many of that original company's Unix assets.
The original SCO lives on renamed to Tarantella [tarantella.com] -- which was basically their only profitable software product at the time of the sale.
Re:Stop reporting it (Score:3, Funny)
"SCO Still Closed
From the This-Is-The-365th-Time-We-Posted-This Dept."
Re:Stop reporting it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop reporting it (Score:5, Insightful)
Could be worse (Score:5, Funny)
McBride then followed-up: "But at least I'm not 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld,"
Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Informative)
Roberts S. McNamara was Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, and largely responsible for the quagmire that the Vietnam War became. (After avoiding responsibility for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and untold thousands or millions of Vietnamese, McNamara was rewarded with the Presidency of The World Bank for twelve years.)
Donald Rumsfeld, of course, is the current Secretary of Defense who decided to ignore military doctrine and top Pentagon generals and top military lawyers in favor of his own ideas on war doctrine and the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.
Here's what one retired officer (an officer right-wing enough to have compared Howard Dean to Hitler, but also an excellent novelist), Ralph Peters, had to say about Rumsfeld today [nypost.com] (emphasis mine):
So I've decided that it's only fair to remind ourselves of our "proud" history of quagmires, by referring to the Secretary of Defense as 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld.
0+0=0 (Score:3, Funny)
stock quote? (Score:2, Funny)
I don't suppose he was looking at the SCOX share price when he said it?
Okay--the stock joke quota has been met (Score:4, Funny)
Now, no more, please?
Loss of words. (Score:2, Insightful)
Choice quote (Score:5, Funny)
So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on
Brought to you by the words "Shoe", "Other" and "Foot".
Re:Choice quote (Score:4, Funny)
Let's see YOU try and wrap it all up! (Score:5, Funny)
As if all that weren't enough, I've tried to bring you people gold, and getting my home IP banned from Slashdot was my only thanks.
This will be my last post to Slashdot as Mr. Darl McBride. Mod it up or mod it down, I don't much care anymore. I'm going back to my simple ranch hand ways while Boies and Sontag round up the rest of whatever's left for our ginormous IP firesale, if there's even anything there to capitalize on anymore.
Thanks to those of you who have moderated me up in the past, those of you who took the time for pithy and cute replies even if you didn't like me, and those who lightened up enough to have a laugh instead of freaking. It's been like... like... it's been like nothing else.
~Darl
Re:Let's see YOU try and wrap it all up! (Score:5, Informative)
Now look at Darl's beady eyes. Which do you think he is?
Does anyone know what Darl is actually going to put on his tax return this year? Well in excess of $1M. He can retire to his farm, and count his coins, until some other company run by scumbags needs a pointman to take the stones thrown at them. In fact, I bet if you interview the current class at Harvard Business School - there are a lot of people who admire Darl for agreeing to be the beat-down man for his pittance of the booty.
Of course, most of the masterminds of the Enron scandal seemed to come from HBS, so there ya go.
article text (Score:5, Informative)
SCO CEO Darl McBride, the most hated man in the computer industry, says he's reached for an analogy to describe SCO's experience since suing IBM. "This is like...," he's said to himself, groping for an elucidating comparison, only to conclude, "Nothing...Nothing compares to what's happened in the last year."
What happened in the last few days proves his point.
BayStar, the venture capital outfit that wants its money back from SCO - a highly uniquely situation even for the computer business - has suddenly and out of the blue doubled its position in the company.
The Royal Bank of Canada, which BayStar brought into the $50 million investment the pair made in SCO last fall, the investor that has reportedly never expressed doubts about the strength of SCO's position or, unlike BayStar, has never complained to SCO about its behavior, sold $20 million worth of its SCO shares to BayStar.
And the bank is converting the rest of its preferred stock - that it paid $10 million for - into 740,740 shares of SCO common presumably to dump it on the public market. Presumably too it won't sell the stock immediately since the conversion cost it $13.50 a share, more than double what SCO's been selling for.
BayStar and the bank's $50 million represented 17.5% of SCO.
Neither BayStar nor the Canadian bank will discuss what happened. The bank merely calls its action a "business decision" and BayStar claims it was presented with "a strategic and financial opportunity."
McBride claims he doesn't know any more than we do. He's had barely any contact with the bank and all he knows is that he got a letter from them last Wednesday outlining what it was doing, but not explaining why.
McBride also claims that he doesn't know what BayStar's about either.
BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract. So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and won't be able to get its money back. The money of course is paying for SCO's legal pursuits.
McBride said he didn't know how buying the bank's shares would strengthen BayStar's position. BayStar, for instance, doesn't have a seat on SCO's board and the shares it owns are non-voting stock.
Presumably, the shares that the Canopy Group owns - and remember, Canopy got close to $300 million out of Microsoft to settle an antitrust suit - would trump any notions BayStar might harbor about a hostile takeover.
BayStar managing partner Larry Goldfarb, the guy responsible for the firm's investment in SCO, told the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that he wants SCO to drop its remaining Unix business, jettison its current management, husband its resources, focus on pursuing its IP claims and mind its Ps and Qs in what it says publicly.
Apparently BayStar's lawyers have been saying the same thing to SCO's lawyers.
One wonders whether Goldfarb taking the Times into his confidence made the bank lose its confidence in its investment, hold BayStar responsible and demand that BayStar buy it out.
BayStar's comment about buying the bank's shares being a "financial opportunity" hints that BayStar paid less for them than the bank did.
Goldfarb told the Times and his PR guy told us - Goldfarb was reportedly out of the country when the news broke and couldn't speak for himself - that despite his disapproval with the way SCO is run he is convinced of the legitimacy of its IP claims and of its winning its case against IBM.
According to BayStar's Web site, Burst.com is part of its portfolio. It's unclear what the VC's position is, but Burst is the company, reduced to one or two people, that's suing Microsoft for a tidy packet. It's one of the private antitrust suits that Microsoft has yet to settle.
Burst claims Microsoft, which it collaborated with for two years, ripped off a media transmission technology it designed to send video and audio files electronically and stuck it in Media Player 9.
Burst has no other business outside its suit and evidently is the model BayStar wants SCO to emulate.
Re:article text (Score:3, Informative)
Alternatively, RBC shorted just under 5% (don't need to report) of SCO when it made the PIPE investment, which is apparently a common business practice, and it redeemed this number of shares in order
"this is like...nothing" (Score:5, Funny)
RBC pulling out (Score:5, Informative)
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
SCO CEO Darl McBride was quoted commenting on their current case against IBM as "This is like...nothing."
Bring in the SEC! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bring in the SEC! (Score:4, Interesting)
Insider sales (over last 6 months): 75,000
Insider purchases: N/A
Or am I just clueless about how this kind of stuff works?
Re:Bring in the SEC! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, well, there's quite the good complaint already submitted, though I don't think it's to the right address. The detail the guy went into with regard to the obvious shady stock trading activities since this case started is pretty astounding.
Take a look at it here [rcn.com].
The best quote: (Score:5, Funny)
That's right, Darl, and don't you just hate it when someone accuses you of doing something wrong but refuses to tell you precisely what?
Sue and Grabbit (Score:5, Interesting)
And there's the bottom-line. Don't produce anything worthwhile and use your <ahem> IP to generate revenue via lawsuits. As if we didn't know ....
Still, the 'jettison management' bit has to have Darl sitting on the edge of his seat!
Re:Sue and Grabbit (Score:2)
Yep, they should have phrased that better, and used the latest "fix all" hype for self-justification, since no nay-sayer would be able to argue against it -
"...drop its remaining Unix business, offshore its current management, "
Re:Sue and Grabbit (Score:4, Funny)
And here's a picture of Darl's seat [www.sco.pl] , courtesy of SCO's just-closed Polish office. (The former manager of which is now setting up his own Linux business, specializing in helping users migrate from SCO's software onto Linux -- which is not SCO's, of course! -- see Groklaw [groklaw.net] for details)
Page weirdness (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft DOUBLED Their SCO Investment!!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bill is not going to give up on this stalking horse.
This could go on forever.
I guess that's the whole freaking idea.
Re:Microsoft DOUBLED Their SCO Investment!!!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
SCO won't see any of this money. It just keeps the bottom from dropping out of their stock price a little longer...
I have an analogy for you (Score:3, Insightful)
When Stalin's and Hitler's alliance collapsed.
Re:I have an analogy for you (Score:2)
When they make the movie (Score:3, Funny)
Re:When they make the movie (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When they make the movie (Score:4, Funny)
Darl: Dude! Where's my code?
IBM: Where's your code dude?
Darl: DUUDE! Where's my code?!?
IBM: I donno dude, where's your code?
- RustyTaco
OT: Awful web design (Score:3, Offtopic)
Interesting though, two of the embedded ads were error pages from IIS. "Too many users are accessing the site at this time" or something. Clearly, whoever is advertising on linuxworld.com is a true believer.
Pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Baystar's demanding their money back due to breach of contract without telling how the contract was breached means they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
Why does this sound so familiar?
Oh, that's right. SCO claims to own code that was put into Linux, but won't tell what code SCO claims to own.
Is this Darl's way of admitting that SCO doesn't have a legal leg to stand on?
A show, er, case about nothing (Score:2)
"Darl is gettin' angry!"
The real scum of the earth ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought "Wow, the stockholders have woken up!" when I first read about the whole BayStar thing.
But fact is, BayStar has issues with SCO because the former is saying "Dump all your staff, minimize expenses, and just sue, sue, sue." and the latter isn't totally complying - so BayStar is taking their ball and going home.
The fuckwits.
Re:The real scum of the earth ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm told... (Score:5, Funny)
Proposed titles for the book includes:
Gates of the Hell!
What else could he say?? (Score:5, Insightful)
SCO has no chance of surviving even if they get the
$5 billion by some stroke of insane luck. Who would do business with a company headed up by this overly litigious asshole? "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with," indeed.
Re:What else could he say?? (Score:5, Funny)
Like that bank heist that went wrong.. (Score:5, Funny)
Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing too interesting to see here, folks. In summation: Darl is still a jackass.
déjà vu (Score:3, Insightful)
From the Article (Score:4, Funny)
That has to be one of the worst sentences I've read in a news article. I know it's still gramatically correct, but talk about hard to follow! Sure it may be off-topic, but WOW! It looks as if anyone can be a writer these days.
Baystar wants to keep SCO low-profile (Score:5, Interesting)
So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight...BayStar has bought up RBC's investment in SCO and wants SCO to get out of every other business it's in and focus on it's pending lawsuits? Doesn't that strike anybody as odd? Basically, BayStar has told SCO to put all of it's eggs in one basket, hoping that the bottom doesn't fall out. If SCO loses against IBM, then there would be nothing left, the stock would take a pounding (probably become "Penny Stock"), and BayStar loses on it's investment. Strange.
Either BayStar is betting a huge wad of cash on this "horserace" hoping for the big payoff, knows something we don't (which I doubt), or is really stupid. Whatever the management at BayStar is smoking, I'd like some of that.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why SCO are suing the "end users" they chose. They're the only ones SCO has a chance with because they've signed SCO contracts permittig things like audits. Even the end user suits aren't about copyrights, they're about contracts. Should SCO win they'll be hyped as copyright victories too. This is the strategy.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of this situation as the mirror of an Angel Investor with an up and coming company. The Angel might invest in 10 startups and have 9 of them die before going public and yet still make a fortune.
In this case, if they can buy 10 failing companies $100M each, each having a $1B+ lawsuit in process, only 1 of those guys has to win their lawsuit for BayStar to make their money back and then some.
What is the best chance that BayStar has for SCO to win? SCO has to focus EVERYTHING on winning (even though by doing so they almost certainly will disappear after the win anyway).
Perhaps this should be the defition of a "Devil Investor"?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if SCO hinted that they would do just this, but they probably din't -commit- to it.
Of course we all know that some times 10 companies out of 10 fail, so BayStar could screw themselves out of the cash, which is why they put pressure on their investments to do the burn-out legislation in an all-out attempt to win.
And I'm with you, I would smoke hundreds of millions of dollars if someone gave me billions to do so
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:3, Informative)
No, because Baystar's largest investor [baystarcapital.com] is owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and their eighth largest investor is Microsoft. This should surprise no one.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:3, Informative)
Or Baystar is merely a front for Microsoft, whose interest in SCO has nothing whatsoever to do with SCO's profit margin, long term business viability, or direct return on investment vis-a-vis the value of SCOX stock.
Which has already been well documented publicly.
Watch for the microsoft buyout (Score:3, Interesting)
If the IP doesn't work, BayStar has probably been assured that M$oft will reimburse them for any losses through a lucrative investment deal down the road. They DO have over a billion in the bank after all. $50 mill is pocket c
borrow some from Rumsfeld (Score:5, Funny)
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
--Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Next Day
I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think... and I assume it's what I said
Re:borrow some from Rumsfeld (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a lunch box there is a tuna fish sandwich and something spongy in a brown paper wrapper. I like tuna fish, that is a 'known' and i don't have to worry about it.
I don't know what's in the brown paper wrapper but I know better then to eat it. That's a 'known unknown' and since I'm not going to eat it, I don't have to worry about that either.
What I didn't have any idea about, however, was that my lunch box was trapped with a spring loaded poison needle, that's an 'unknown unknown'. Because I didn't have any idea my lunch box could be trapped, I'm dead.
There's nothing he can say he's done (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially, to allege a slander of title, you have to come to the court with
1) Evidence that you won the title being slandered,
2) Evidence that the slanderer knew it,
3) and that you suffered damages as part of the slander.
The problem is that SCO not only has failed to show evidence of 1 and 2, Novell is waving the letter around where SCO asked Novell for the copyrights.
Now, if the court dismisses the suit stating that SCO's ownership of the copyrights is in doubt, their case against Autozone collapses, and Red hat can get summary judgement that Linux does not infringe on SCO's copyrights.
Meanwhile IBM's counterclaims, once litigated will leave SCO in bakrupcy and the GPL will have had its day in court (IBM is suing SCO, among other things, for distributing IBM's copyrighted code while violating the terms of the GPL by forbidding the creation of derivative works).
Free/Open Source software has been helped rather than hurt by this lawsuit; it is more famous, and its opponents are displaying themselves to be incompetent bufoons. It has educated many of us about the field of intellectual property law.
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
does this sound familier (Score:5, Interesting)
"BayStar hasn't withdrawn its demand that SCO return its money and BayStar's lawyers, he said, still haven't told SCO's lawyers how SCO breached their contract. So McBride figures BayStar doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and won't be able to get its money back."
hasent this been what SCO is doing to IBM - Not telling them anything..
An odd pathology (Score:5, Funny)
SCO seems to be running around locking all the doors, and they're the only ones in the building.
informed CEOs (Score:3, Funny)
McBride also claims that he doesn't know what BayStar's about either.
You gotta wonder what this guy does all day in his office. I'm thinking he's the member of an uber guild on Everquest with a level 65 rogue totally decked out in planar armor.
Correction to the article (Score:5, Informative)
From the article: "And the bank is converting the rest of its preferred stock - that it paid $10 million for - into 740,740 shares of SCO common presumably to dump it on the public market. Presumably too it won't sell the stock immediately since the conversion cost it $13.50 a share, more than double what SCO's been selling for."
Always good to see quality journalism. That $13.50 is per share of *preferred stock,* which originally sold for $1000.
Here's the math:
They're cashing out 10,000 shares of preferred for 740,740 shares of regular. Regular is 5.16 now, which is about what it would be worth at conversion - bringing them $3,822,218. This also means their shares of preferred stock are worth $3822/share right now. It will cost $13.50/*preferred* share - not common share as claimed by the article - to convert the 10,000 shares. This amounts to a 3.5% loss on the conversion, but that looks golden right now. It certainly would have made no sense if the $13.50 were per common share, as the article mistakenly claimed. In other words, they didn't pay a $13.50 fee to sell a $5 stock.
Also of interest - the purchase price of the stock was $10,000,000. Given the return of $3.8M, that means that they bought their stock at a price equivalent to $13.57/share of common stock. Probably looked good at one time...to someone.
Most ironic thing I've read for a while (Score:3, Insightful)
The irony here is just sickening.
Can't afford to let any of the court cases wrap up (Score:4, Interesting)
There for awhile, SCO was a pretty darn good engine for anti-Linux FUD. And it's pretty clear that was the specific intent of all of Darl's motormouth behavior. But that strategy has by now completely played itself out.
Now, the absolute WORST thing that could happen in that regard is for any of the court cases to wrap themselves up. If your goal is anti-Linux FUD, a wrap up of any of the suits would appear as a Linux stamp of approval and send it off running.
So the question is, after attempting every stalling tactic in the book, what effect would a change in ownership of the IP at the center of the court cases have on the cases themselves? And is Baystar in a position to facilitate just such a change of ownership?
Guess we'll know pretty soon...
Oh the irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the message is clear: (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
BayStar managing partner Larry Goldfarb [...] wants SCO to drop its remaining Unix business, jettison its current management, husband its resources, focus on pursuing its IP claims and mind its Ps and Qs in what it says publicly.
And, a bit further down:
that despite his disapproval with the way SCO is run he is convinced of the legitimacy of its IP claims and of its winning its case against IBM.
What BayStar wants is not for SCO to drop its lawsuits -- it wants to expand them, if anything. And it wants SCO to drop the irrelevant parts of its business while doing so -- meaning everything but the lawyers.
Problem is, current SCO management doesn't want to do this. Worse yet, the management is criminally incompetent when it comes to knowing when to shut the fuck up and is garnering additional ill will by saying silly things. (Which, in a worst case scenario could be admitted as evidence by the judge -- highly doubtful though).
Anyone that thinks Baystar is a friend to the Linux or OSS crowd is not reading. It's not even legal meanderings -- it's plain English folks! Baystar feels the only "real" business SCO has is in the courts. And that's precisely what we don't want, because it will mean a long, drawn out court fight.
Given all this, we should be cheering for McBride. He's much more likely to cock things up than Baystar is.
Re:This Is News For Nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
If he has a claim against the community he should state it with specificity, he has never done this. The community should be given the chance to fix any problems (that's a right under the law) and they have never been given that chance.
SCO does not want this. SCO wants to tax us all for work others have done on copyrights they don't even own if Novell is to be believed.
McBride is a despicable man of low character, he has demonstrated this to most rational thinkers and he deserves the public scorn that is heaped upon him.