Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
There are many many companies making excellent money from this "free" Unix. Redhat's market cap is $4B, partly by partnering with IBM instead of fighting them. Oracle/Novell are trying to figure out how to leverage their abilities. SCO was in the perfect position to be the top of them all.
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None had the debt that SCO incurred to own Unix. Those Linux companies came to market flush with stock market money - and no debt. And still some of those Linux companies failed. Failed when they did not even pay for the license.
Meanwhile SCO's business model was dependent on a license that only they owned. SCO could never match what Red Hat could offer IBM. SCO had paid for their license. Red Hat did not. SCO had already sold their stock to buy a license. SCO could not compete against companies that paid nothing for the product and could still sell stock.
So where are these massive profits in Novell? Novell also had to sell out. Novell also could not compete against competitors whose product cost them nothing. Maybe SCO should have sold out to Oracle for pennies on dollar. But instead, SCO decided to survive. No one can blame them for taking the only financially viable option - protect the value of their license.
Others are saying that SCO should have burned a big buck license - and declare it valueless. What company simply burns their only asset? No SCO stockholder would have accepted that. SCO was clearly blindsided by something that nobody saw coming - Linux. SCO could never stay solvent on the Red Hat model. SCO already had too much invested in the Unix license. The resulting lawsuits decided one thing. The license that SCO bought had zero value. In business, that was a severe wake-up call to all companies. But again, the Silicon Valley created new standards for business – as confirmed by the resulting legal resolutions.
I have sympathy for the SCO stockholders. They had no reason to expect that a massive freight train would hit them. Without that license, SCO could not survive in the Unix business.