Dear ANALyst ledite:

Message ID: 27837
Posted By: bill_beebe
Posted On: 2003-08-13 23:10:00
Subject: Dear ANALyst ledite:

You are, as usual, delusional. Many of us do indeed own stocks (outright or through other means) and we've taken time over the years to educate ourselves to the workings of the market in order to better profit from it. In fact it might interest you to know that IT technology plays a critical role the modern stock markets, technology built with and on top of Unix and similar operating systems.

I have been programming systems since I was a junior in high school (1971). My first language was APL, and my first "personal computer" was an IBM 360 with a Dec printer/keyboard combination attached via a 300 bd acoustic coupled modem. From that simple time I've been both witness to and participant in the ongoing evolution of IT. During that time I have paid my dues and I have also paid (sometimes dearly) cold hard cash for goods and services rendered to me by others in the industry. I'm not some "crunchy" trying to steal IP secrets via Linux.

As I said, I've witnessed quite a bit, not the least of which is the long, storied history of Unix. I'm also quite familiar with original SCO, because I've either specified SCO, installed SCO, or worked with existing SCO installations on a number of jobs (for a while it drove a portion of the E.T. ride at Universal Studios in Orlando, FL, before being replaced by Windows NT). The original SCO was expensive, and by 1995 I and the company I was working for at the time purchased Consensys Unix (based on Univel) for a mere $250/box. It came with the base OS, compiler tools, X, and networking (TCP/IP and NFS file sharing). It ran on 16MHz 486 boxen. The same functionality from SCO would have cost us close to $2000/seat. SCO's pricing on x86 also drove us (and others) to Windows NT.

With what I know concerning the history of Unix, current SCO (a.k.a Caldera) execs are equivalent to cheap ambulance chasers. They managed to pick up the tattered remains of Sys V after it passed through many previous hands. In fact this argument has been played out before between AT&T and BSDI (with AT&T playing the part of SCOX), and AT&T lost. The unethical and immoral executives of the new SCO are not the stewards of Unix technology. They have absolutely no appreciation of the technology or background of what they own, only its potential monetary value. As a consequence they have undertaken a destructive course of action to squeeze out every last dime they possibly can before industry outrage and the law finally stop them.

You'll see the stock price rise for a bit as other equally greedy investors bid up the SCOX stock price. The insiders already know what will happen, and they're selling. If they were really long they wouldn't have sold a single share. They'd have invested even more.

The text of this Yahoo Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board user "bill_beebe" under the following license: License: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.