There
weren't many "minority shareholders." This company always
was, "for all financial intents and purposes,"
one man. (That status has changed somewhat since then, as a direct result of the lawsuit and the complete loss-of-business that ensued.)
As always, the source, written by a competent lawyer no less, is
http://groklaw.net....
It is painfully obvious to
everyone, including the Honorable Court, that this entire matter was an outrageous attempt at a bluff. The company's business had degenerated to the point that it practically consisted only of the contract with IBM, and this contract was subsequently lost. Furthermore, the competing system, Linux, was one that SCO
could not compete against. SCO had no cards to play. Its only hope, or so it thought, was to sue IBM in an attempt to force it to "settle," that is to say,
extortion in the form of a forced buyout which certainly would have made Mr. McBride a wealthy man. Had the gambit succeeded, it would have been worth it.
Well worth it.
Unfortunately for SCO and its lawyers... this was a matter that
couldn't be resolved with a buyout. The stakes were too high. If IBM had bowed to this demand, paying off McBride/SCO in order to "make the problem go away" even without admitting any fault (and it has none), its ability to use open-source software of
any kind would have been transformed into a hornet's nest of "me, too" litigants. Microsoft would have been next in line, perhaps still smarting from the OS/2 debacle and toting truckloads of papers showing how anything in Linux that
remotely resembles "an operating system" must have "infringed upon" the Windows code that IBM no-doubt had access to during the OS/2 days. It would have been an unending series of lawsuits, not just for IBM but for anyone and everyone else, each one a repetition of the same lawyerly extortion.
(You see, the days are gone when a business used to have to pay protection to "Leo the Torch" to keep him from burning down his factory. Now, Leo is a lawyer. And if you have money, you constantly pay him "protection" (literally!) not to sue you. And/Or you pay him off, every time he shows up, just to make him go away... because,
whether or not his case actually has merit, it's just too expensive to fight him in the courts, and he knows it. Many unscrupulous lawyers make their living that way. And even though SCO will lose, its
lawyers most decidedly will
not.)
Will they "go after" McBride and his cronies? Oh, probably not. There won't be anything
left of SCO financially, and the court judgement against them will be quite enough for having established a clear precedent. These are simply failed-businessmen, possibly talked into the whole thing by their lawyers, who made an outrageous bid to save their fortunes ... and lost. Rather a
human thing to do, actually. At this point, what really matters most are a few loose ends... an official "finding of fact" by the Court that SCO
did violate the Lanham Act and so on... to establish the legal position once and for all. SCO does not
have any money left, nor will it ever get any. (Nor did it
ever deserve any.) To keep this case from repeating itself again and again and again, the legal precedents in this case must be irrefutably established.
The judge knows perfectly well that there will be appeals ... that is also what lawyers do, if they can. No matter how long it takes, every crack upon which an appeal could be anchored must be methodically closed.
