SEO

Well I guess it's no surprise, but I read in one of my trade comics at work
that SCO has effectively admitted that it risks running out of cash before it
resolves it's court cases. I can't remember the details, and the article is
at work, but the gist of it is that the only year they've actually made a
profit was 2003 when they persuaded a few people to pay it's 'licence fee'
for using their alledged intellectual property in Linux. Now thay are to the
point where income from these licences has dried up pending resulution of the
court cases, income from product and support sales has dropped dramatically,
and they cannot see how to further reduce operating costs without affecting
their ability to support current customers/products.

This is all in their filings with the SEC I believe.

So, all together now ... "we told you so !"

Simon

Simon Hobson wrote:
> Well I guess it's no surprise, but I read in one of my trade comics at work

It isn't a surprise but thats also because the SEC filings are old news
to anyone who reads linuxtoday.com or groklaw.net.

If you wait a couple of months we'll probably see someone else post the
same news, quoting a monthly magazine.

> that SCO has effectively admitted that it risks running out of cash before it
> resolves it's court cases. I can't remember the details, and the article is
> at work, but the gist of it is that the only year they've actually made a
> profit was 2003 when they persuaded a few people to pay it's 'licence fee'
> for using their alledged intellectual property in Linux.

ISTR that would almost wholly be Microsoft buying Unix licences
unrelated to Microsoft's use of Linux.

> Now thay are to the
> point where income from these licences has dried up pending resulution of the
> court cases, income from product and support sales has dropped dramatically,
> and they cannot see how to further reduce operating costs without affecting
> their ability to support current customers/products.
>
> This is all in their filings with the SEC I believe.
>
> So, all together now ... "we told you so !"

If the "we" and "you" are who I think they are, you'll find almost
everyone here is a member of both groups!

OTOH if "you" means "techie employees of the Linux company formerly
known as Caldera", there's never really been that many of them
hereabouts so far as I can tell.

If "you" means Michels/Love/McBride, I doubt any of them are reading
this newsgroup.

Ian Wilson wrote:
> Simon Hobson wrote:

>> Now thay are to the point where income from these licences has dried
>> up pending resulution of the court cases, income from product and
>> support sales has dropped dramatically, and they cannot see how to
>> further reduce operating costs without affecting their ability to
>> support current customers/products.
>>
>> This is all in their filings with the SEC I believe.
>>
>> So, all together now ... "we told you so !"
>
>
> If the "we" and "you" are who I think they are, you'll find almost
> everyone here is a member of both groups!

But people always need someone to sneer at. No matter how many times so
many of us said that we absolutely agreed that SCO made a fantastically
dumb move here and that it would surely cost them dearly, we have always
had people who want to see us as flag waving zealots who need to be
slapped into sensibility.

I will hate to see SCO die, both because it will make things even more
difficult for the folks still stuck on a SCO OS, and because the death
of any Unix vendor just strengthens the sob's in Redmond. I still
expect that there's enough revenue to make it worthwhile that SOMEBODY
buy out the ip and do something useful with it - too bad it wasn't
RedHat back when they had the strength to do it.. I'd love to see SCO
IP end up in Open Source hands - boy, it would be so amusing if Novell
ended up buying all that back with the ip and released it all.. now
there's a pleasant day dream. Probably never happen, but fun to
comtemplate the "what if".

And of course - they could still pull off a last minute miracle. I'm
not at the point where I'd bet my life against that, but I'm awfully
close.. water can boil at 32 degrees F and stones can fall up, but
nobody would ever go broke betting against it. I doubt anyone risks
much betting against SCO right now, either.

Anyway, I'm getting pretty disgusted with computing in general. The
level of spam, viruses and hacking attacks is simply overwhelming.
Security concerns now take up way too much of my time and while it may
be intellectually challenging and interesting in the abstract, it's no
fun in reality. It's distracting, and wearing, and I'm sick of it.




--
Tony Lawrence
Unix/Linux/Mac OS X resources: http://aplawrence.com