[Sussex] 5 years ago today and SCO

[Steve Dobson]

Paul

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 06:17:10PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-28 at 10:40 +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> > I see your point, but to me nothing much has changed.  One company has
> > a change of CEO (and other board members) and then they try to play a
> > different game - that's business.  I'm not saying that I like it, or
> > that I agree with it, just that that is the way the (western) world works.
> 
> Not sure as we're disagreeing, just saying similar things in different
> ways :)

Well that's nothing new for me or this list.

<snip>

> > Oh, I agree that my theories are speculative at best.  But a settlement
> > out of court would have been between SCO & IBM - McBride would not see
> > an huge increase in his personal wealth.  But IBM (or anyone else) buying
> > SCO would allow McBride to significantly increase his wealth - via his
> > SCO stock options.
> 
> They would, but it was thought that he did pretty well out of the share
> price rise in the early days of the court case - I can't remember
> whether he personally sold a chunk of shares or not though. To be honest
> I've half lost interest and tend to concentrate more on the hands on
> practicalities of things.

Any rise is share price in which you have options may increase your paper
worth but it is not real.  For McBride to make money he needs to exercise
his options, there are normally time limits before those can be executed.
In that time SCOX's price has gone into something akin to free fall.

There are been some "special" conditions put in place.  SCO tried to make
it look like protection for upper management should SCO get bought, but 
for me (and others) it looked more like a "get McBride rich" scheme.
Then again, what do I know about stocks and shares?
 
<snip>

> > The answer I came up with is that M$ want SCO to fail, to stop trading as
> > a results of damages awarded to IBM.  The reason is clear - M$'s FUD machine
> > can create merry hell over the first Linux company to destroyed over a
> > GPL issue.  In a way you are part of that FUD story with your switch from
> > Caldera to RedHat to Debian.
> 
> MS are in a win win situation with SCO. If SCO win then Linux suddenly
> falls in a bad light because it is risky on the IP front. If they loose
> then the GPL has resulted in a big name (well, once!) ceasing to trade -
> although I'd say the latter was a pure FUD campaign, but a typical MS
> one :)

One point that we clearly agree on.
 
> I'm not entirely sure how my switch is part of the FUD story.

I had no idea of the times of your switching.  But as you were once
part of Caldera's user base that have now departed then doesn't that
make you part of SCO's fall?

> I switched
> from Caldera to Red Hat way before any of this happened. Caldera were
> still a solid Linux company back in 1997 when I switched. I went Caldera
> because I'd read some good press and the certification idea looked good
> (I was heading into AIX support at the time and Linux on x86 was the
> closest I could get to hands on experience at home - I'd been following
> Linux for some time already though).
> The final (maybe?) step to
> Debian was as a result of a combination of Dependency Hell and the RH7
> GCC fiasco.

Okay, so we both transfered to Debian well before the SCO cases were 
started.  I first ran Slackware way back when.  Then switched to Solaris
x86, 'cos Linux didn't support the programming I wanted to do then.
Later I installed RedHat (probably RH5) from a free CD coverdisk just
before moving to a company with a tame Debian Developer - he showed me
the error of my ways.
 
<snip>

Steve

-- 
Go away, I'm all right.
		-- H.G. Wells' last words.
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