Poor little ol' Darl
Message ID: 281724
Posted By: atul666
Posted On: 2005-07-15 04:59:00
Subject: Poor little ol' Darl
Recs: 6
There's just nothing good for Darl in the Davidson memo. First, obviously, there's the increased possibility of legal trouble, which has already been discussed at length here, many many times. I still think he's probably going to get away scot-free. If SCO was a normal company, probably not, but the vast majority of SCO stock is held by a few big funds & institutions, and it seems very likely to me that many of them were in on the scam, and knew the whole thing was a fraud from day 1. I'd put at least Cohen, Renaissance, and Baystar in that category, at minimum. So I think they'd all prefer this stays out of court. They'll just pass the losses along to their own bagholders, and move on with zero consequences. As for criminal charges, it's important to remember that although SCO is fairly infamous, they're also pretty small in the larger scheme of things, and there isn't a charismatic, photogenic victim to cry for the cameras. It's true that a number of pension funds have invested and lost money on SCOX, but they haven't actually gone under, so their managers can probably just declare it part of a "challenging year" and move on, with zero consequences.
Even though I think Darl's no closer to legal trouble than before, his reputation's certainly taking a beating. For those of us in the anti-SCO camp, the fact that SCO knew in advance that there was no SysV code in Linux comes as no surprise. But this is the sort of two-faced, dishonest behavior that ought to get the attention of any PHBs out there who were thinking of doing business with Darl, or were skittish about switching to Linux because SCO's FUD still seemed halfway credible.
Even if someone (Esker, for instance) generally thinks Darl is the world's ultimate genius businessman, his reputation still takes a beating because of this email. I'm pretty sure I've read Darl either saying outright, or implying, that SCOSource was his baby, his grand plan to save the company. Now we find out that it was a pre-existing plan, gathering dust on the shelf, before Darl ever walked through the door at SCOX HQ. I've argued on several occasions that Darl is nothing but a hired hand, a guy who knew squat about Unix or Linux when he came on board, and who was hired by Yarro & Co. strictly as a mad-dog litigator, not as an ideas guy.
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The text of this Yahoo Message Board post has been licensed for
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Posted By: atul666
Posted On: 2005-07-15 04:59:00
Subject: Poor little ol' Darl
Recs: 6
There's just nothing good for Darl in the Davidson memo. First, obviously, there's the increased possibility of legal trouble, which has already been discussed at length here, many many times. I still think he's probably going to get away scot-free. If SCO was a normal company, probably not, but the vast majority of SCO stock is held by a few big funds & institutions, and it seems very likely to me that many of them were in on the scam, and knew the whole thing was a fraud from day 1. I'd put at least Cohen, Renaissance, and Baystar in that category, at minimum. So I think they'd all prefer this stays out of court. They'll just pass the losses along to their own bagholders, and move on with zero consequences. As for criminal charges, it's important to remember that although SCO is fairly infamous, they're also pretty small in the larger scheme of things, and there isn't a charismatic, photogenic victim to cry for the cameras. It's true that a number of pension funds have invested and lost money on SCOX, but they haven't actually gone under, so their managers can probably just declare it part of a "challenging year" and move on, with zero consequences.
Even though I think Darl's no closer to legal trouble than before, his reputation's certainly taking a beating. For those of us in the anti-SCO camp, the fact that SCO knew in advance that there was no SysV code in Linux comes as no surprise. But this is the sort of two-faced, dishonest behavior that ought to get the attention of any PHBs out there who were thinking of doing business with Darl, or were skittish about switching to Linux because SCO's FUD still seemed halfway credible.
Even if someone (Esker, for instance) generally thinks Darl is the world's ultimate genius businessman, his reputation still takes a beating because of this email. I'm pretty sure I've read Darl either saying outright, or implying, that SCOSource was his baby, his grand plan to save the company. Now we find out that it was a pre-existing plan, gathering dust on the shelf, before Darl ever walked through the door at SCOX HQ. I've argued on several occasions that Darl is nothing but a hired hand, a guy who knew squat about Unix or Linux when he came on board, and who was hired by Yarro & Co. strictly as a mad-dog litigator, not as an ideas guy.
------------------------------------------------------------
The text of this Yahoo Message Board post has been licensed for
copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board user "atul666"
under the following license:
License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0
------------------------------------------------------------