[tetsuo13]

The action that McBride took resulted ultimately in what could be seen as a failed strategy, but the fact that he went out on a limb in attempting to revitalize his company speaks wonders. There are a lot of companies that would value a CEO who can take risks.

[jacquesm]

Allowing your company to be used as an attack vehicle against a global movement is not just 'taking risks', it's criminally stupid.

For what McBride has done he deserves to be behind bars, not to be someone that is 'valued as a CEO' or in any other capacity. I remember the 'millions of lines' episode, as well as a whole bunch of others.

He played the dirtiest game ever and made a lot of money in the process while shafting his shareholders in the process. Don't forget that SCO was a publicly traded company.

If he had had a real strategy instead of positioning SCO as a tool for microsoft to do their dirty work for them they might have made it in good health to today.

[davidmathers]

Don't forget that SCO was a publicly traded company.

According to my (admittedly fuzzy) memory they were trading somewhere around $12 a share when the "be as evil as possible" plan was unveiled.

[jacquesm]

Considerably more than that even, but the point is that in 2001 or so when they still had a company they could have made a go of it instead of doing a sleazy deal with Microsoft to become part of th FUD campaign against open source.

And at that pint there were still plenty of people on board, including of course their employees (the non-sleazy variety).

Here's the graph:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOXQ.PK&t=my&l=on&#...

[Xichekolas]

I remember at the time thinking they were a prime company to short. Their case was absurd from the get-go... it's amazing it took so long to implode.

[joe_the_user]

As I recall, the value of SCO stocked rose and dropped quite a while ago and in a predictable way, even before the trials began.

I also recall it being impossible to short SCO since said stock was not available to be borrowed and sold, ie, the stock may have gotten up to $12/share but not very many shared were actually sold at that price.

I also recall that, at at least point, SCO was able to maintain their operations primarily through an investment by Microsoft, an "investment" which just about everyone could see would not turn a profit but would provide MS value in "other ways".

This is just my memory, so corrections are welcome...

[tetsuo13]

At the risk of being downvoted out of existence, perhaps I should clarify.

I'm definitely not advocating his actions in the least, just saying that there are other companies that may not be doing well on the market and would be interested in someone who can take risks. More than anything this entire endeavor has been a warning to us that we haven't seen the last of this sort of behavior -- whether or not from McBride remains to be seen, but there are others who will also take these sorts of risks.

[aminuit]

Darl McBride wasn't taking any risks. He was being compensated to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for driving SCO to bankruptcy. There was no risk involved if he was going to be rewarded regardless of the outcome.

[jacquesm]

The only risk McBride ever took was whether or not his deal with Microsoft would be uncovered. If you look at the timetable of all the transactions around the investment by baystar it is clear that something is very smelly indeed.

I highly doubt that there are many situations to be sketched where a large and wealthy company is willing to pay money under the table to start a set of legal proceedings that are doomed to fail against innocent bystanders.

And if any such companies do exist then I hope they will follow SCOs trail, only a bit swifter please.

As for McBride leaving SCO, one way to interpret this is that there really are no more bits of meat left on the corpse.