SCO
Update
SCO
ended August with a flurry of news.
It will depend on your point of view (bias?) whether you
think that news might have been good or bad for SCO and,
therefore, for the Open Source community.
-
SCO
re-negotiated its contract with its prestigious law firm,
Boies, Schiller & Flexner, capping
its legal expenses (as best we can track the answers through
the fog) at $31 million over fees already paid plus an
increase in the promised contingency fee from 20% to as much
as 33%.
You
could read this lot of ways:
SCO is getting worried about having enough money to
survive through to the trial.
Boies is so confident about the outcome that he’s
perfectly willing to trade off some money in the present and
near future for more money eventually.
-
SCO
has passed a “poison pill” to prevent the company being
taken over at its current very low valuation.
SCO apparently thinks (some guessing here) that IBM
might try to buy them out at distress sale prices.
That, of course, is always an option, but we suspect
that if IBM wanted to buy out SCO they would have done so
already.
-
A
number of prominent IP attorneys have expressed public
opinions that the SCO case looks less and less winnable.
This no doubt heartens IBM, Novell, et al but it
doesn’t seem to keep SCO from thinking that they will
prevail.
A
number of court dates are on the calendar soon and we’ll start
to see whose version of the facts – IBM’s or SCO’s – the
judge is leaning toward.
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