SEC Investigating SCO? 281
Udo Schmitz writes "As Groklaw reports, the SCO Group stated in a SEC filing from yesterday: 'In addition, regulators or others in the Linux market and some foreign regulators have initiated or in the future may initiate legal actions against us, all of which may negatively impact our operations and future operating performance.' Does this mean the SEC finally started to pull some stops? SCOs and Canopys financial dealings (Vultus acquisition anyone?) long ago lead to speculations in the Linux community about the legality of their business practices, or the whole lawsuit just being a stock scam."
More info (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:2, Informative)
Normally this would be fine (if you stole my code, and started selling it, why shouldn't i sue you) except they have not been able to pony up any rock hard evidence. As such they are sueing just to threaten people. There have been companies who decided to pay instead of going into a legal battle (understandable from a bottom line perspective)...other companies, such as IBM have been giving SCO the big FU and went to court.
In general, assuming you are new to
P.s. if some of my data is a bit wrong, be gentle with your anal probes of death.
standard template language (Score:2, Informative)
This is absolutely no indication that there's a SEC investigation on the horizon and shows how really ignorant of standard business practices the Groklaw and anti-SCO folks really are. SCO is nicely imploding on its own; no reason to start a lot of false rumors (and speculating falsely about something that can effect stock prices is prosecutable, by the way; Ms. Jones should know that) when there's simply no need.
10-K (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:5, Informative)
I believe that's Santa Cruz Operations.
This is perfectly normal. (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, read the prospectus of a company you know and understand very well, such as a traditional retailer like Wal-Mart, Target, Borders, or Barnes and Noble. They'll list things like potential litigation, seasonal variances, competitors, natural disasters, affect of the institution of internet taxation on their business, etc., etc.
So, this is SCO's way of trying to prevent a class action suit by shareholders in the event that they are sued by companies/persons in the Linux community.
I hope the SEC is investigating (Score:4, Informative)
SCO's management claimed that the stock sales (which you can find on their Form 4 filings with the SEC [sec.gov]) were part of a pre-arranged sale plan that had absolutely nothing to do with the litigation. The sale plan was filed two months before the lawsuit was filed. That sure seems plausible to me.
I really hope someone nails these slimeballs.
(P.S. I've posted several notes on /. about this;
here's one from back in June 2003 [slashdot.org].)
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:3, Informative)
Also, it's important to note that the current SCO is not the same company as the SCO out of California. The current SCO is a group out of Utah that purchased the old SCO along with all of its IP.
The current SCO is purely an IP company. They have never developed software on their own, and should not be confused with the (much less evil) SCO of old.
Common mistake (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:1, Informative)
They purchased PART of Old SCO. The rest of Old SCO is now Tarantella, I believe.
Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
There is only one other company who's financial situation I followed the last years: AAPL. I just checked some of their SEC filings for similar sentences and: Nope, couldn't find anything like this.
Re:Good chance of it being a scam (Score:1, Informative)
No, it means they perform due diligence. If due diligence says "hey these people are infringing our patent, lets sue them", then so be it. No real due diligence effort will say "Hey, we're dying so lets sue IBM for patent infringement, wait a few weeks, change the lawsuit to copyright infringement, wait a few weeks, then change the lawsuit to breach of contract, then claim in court that IBM worked on 64 bit processors without us ever knowing about it only to have some girl running some stupid website pull up some moldy old bit of PR we issued years ago discussing SCO and IBMs collaboration on 64 bit processor architectures, then make more unproven accusations to cover up the fact that we got nothing"
extending the life of a failing company for another few years so that shareholders have time to sell
As someone else said, attempting to make a dead company look good so you can sell your stock is EXACTLY the kind of scam the SEC frowns upon.
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:5, Informative)
This is the second time I heard them called "Santa Clara Operations". It's "The Santa Cruz Operation". They were a joint venture with Microsoft to write a port of Unix System V to the 8086 and 8088. They called this port Xenix. Microsoft was supposed to pay SCO licensing for Xenix, but since they never used it, they figured they didn't have to pay SCO. SCO demanded rights to Xenix back, and got it.
For a while, SCO Unix sort of held its own on cost. The damn thing didn't even come with TCP/IP (you had to buy it from Excelan or another vendor) but once you got it up, you could run backoffice apps like order printing on the cheap, and it was reliable enough as long as you had a competent admin. They later grew into a bloated corporate entity with an increasingly shoddy product, but they had a moment in the sun. Later, the same company went on to produce products like Reflection (a rather good terminal emulator package, later sold off to WRQ and becoming Reflection X), and Tarantella, which was like VNC well before VNC. Tarantella was the most successful SCO product ever, and eventually SCO changed its name to match the product.
Tarantella sold off the name SCO to Caldera, a company whose history I know less of, except that they appear to be the working retirement package for Novell executives. Since Novell was going nowhere with their shiny new trophy -- the Unix name -- they sold it off to Caldera. Additionally, they bought the SCO name from Tarantella, who appeared more than happy to be rid of it. They started a not-terribly-well-received commercial Linux distribution, but also poured quite a lot of resources into free software development including KDE and various network utilities.
All was pretty happy for a while until a major shareholder, The Canopy Group then led by Ralph Yarro III, decided that this Linux thing wasn't really all that hot after all, and decided to kick Ransom Love out and replace him with Darl McBride -- another former Novell exec. McBride apparently agreed with Yarro that the demise of Project Monterey, a joint venture with IBM that scuttled SCO's prospects (that is, Caldera SCO, not Tarantella SCO) when it went away, meant that IBM had to pay, and pay hard, and that since they went with Linux, Linux had to pay too.
The rest you can read on Groklaw. I have to get back to work
Re:And the world wept (Score:3, Informative)
Slight, but substantial difference.
If it's slight, then it's not substantial. I think the word you were looking for was "subtle".
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:5, Informative)
The SCO Group started as Cadera Systems and was split off from Novell in 1994. They were a Linux Distributor and was involved in the devolopement of the Red Hat Package Manager. In 2001 they acquire most of SCO includig rights to use the name. In 2002, Ransom Love leaves as CEO and Daryl McBride is named the new CEO. Later the name is changed from Caldera to the SCO Group, SCO for short. 2003 The IBM lawsuit is launched. SCO produces ever more ridiculous PR pieces. Eventually the mainstream press catches on that SCO is full of it (and I don't mean Information Technology).
Most of this available as a timeline from SCO [caldera.com]
But "similar" is the point (Score:4, Informative)
"LNUX and RHAT filings also contain similar template language[...]"
Just checked the last LNUX filing and found sentences like: "The Company is subject to various claims and legal actions arising in the ordinary course of business." I bet you'll find stuff like that in the filings of a lot of listed companies, but I didn't find mentions of "legal actions" "initiated" by "regulators".
Re:I hear quite abit about SCO (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good chance of it being a scam (Score:3, Informative)
Re:stock scams (Score:2, Informative)