Oh the joy, the sheer unadulterated delight…
BayStar, the company that (together with the RBC bank) invested 50 million dollars in SCO in order for SCO to sue IBM and Novell over (alleged) inclusions to and copyright of Linux and UNIX, and any users of Linux like AutoZone and DaimlerCrysler, is having some trouble understanding why they somehow came out the other end with much less money then SCO led them to believe they would have, (and much less money then they put in.)
This new story comes to light as SCO just suffered it’s second big setback in their litigation, firstly the AutoZone case was stayed, and secondly the DaimlerCrysler case has been all but thrown out.
SCO needed to win or at least proceed to trial against one of them (Linux users) before IBM and/or Novell shot their case down, and now it looks like neither case will ever reach a jury at all. From the look of it, SCO were hoping that if they scored a couple of big victories against Linux users, before the IBM or Novell cases came to a head, thousands of Linux users would be scared (extorted) into buying licenses from SCO for their Linux machines. The problem is that those pesky opposing parties are proving far more competent and knowledgeable then SCO have shown themselves to be.
BayStar considers these events as contrary to what SCO told them would happen before the investment of the fifty million occurred. BayStar now wants to know why SCO has been “creative” in their public releases, in comparison to what they privately told BayStar, with regard to their chances of success. As a result, BayStar is filing a request for a declaratory judgement to try and find out how and why they got fleeced by SCO.
I really love it when someone gets what they deserved. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. BayStar has only themselves to blame. If they had done their own research instead of relying on Microsoft’s obviously biased opinion, they would have known that not only has Linux proven itself very clean, but also that ownership of UNIX code copyrights have been very cloudy for about 20 years.
What is most ironic to me, is that BayStar didn’t really mind all that much when SCO made press claims about “millions of lines of stolen code”, that later on were proven as total lies. (SCO signed off in court (twice) that they had given all evidence of stolen code, and it amounted to no code.). So it’s OK to lie to the general public, you’re just not allowed to lie to your shareholders.
There has been some speculation on Groklaw that BayStar might be acting at the behest of Microsoft, who might be thinking that now that the cases all look like going against SCO that it might be a good time to pull the pin and shut down SCO before any legal precedents about Linux’s validity are set in a manner not beneficial to Linux’s only real competitor. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it is, then at some stage it will get leaked and end up in the Halloween site where the rest of the leaked documents reside. Besides, it won’t matter if SCO goes bust before the conclusion of the cases, IBM, Novell and Redhat can insist on rulings anyway, they best they can hope for, is for BayStar and SCO to settle in some way that hides any involvement Microsoft had (apart from arranging BayStar’s SCO funding in the first place) in “non disclosed” documents. (assuming of course that there was any other MS involvement.)
regards
Franki
