Are SCO Execs in trouble?

From Mark Webbink:

Some have speculated that it would be worthwhile to now take SCO off the market. Heck, their market cap is now under $10 million. The problem is that paying $10 million to buy SCO would not be the end of it. SCO is still embroiled in the IBM case and the Red Hat case, to say nothing of the on-going claims that Novell has. In addition, when the lights finally flicker out on SCO, look for some shareholder lawsuits based on violation of securities laws. If you go back to the press conferences that SCO repeatedly called back in 2003 and 2004, they never began those press conferences by making the standard disclaimers cautioning investors to take what they were saying with a grain of salt. As a consequence, investors had every right to take what Darl McBride and Chris Sontag were saying in public back then as the gospel truth. Like McBride stating publicly that SCO owned the copyrights to Unix in the spring of 2003 while he was privately corresponding with Novell begging them to transfer the copyrights to SCO.

We have come a long way from that day in 2003 when McBride suggested IBM buy SCO for $500 million.

I’d expect shareholder lawsuits once SCOX runs out of money and it looks like Darl McBride and Chris Sontag might end up getting a little more than they bargained for. It would have been nice to see this case make it all the way through to judgment, but it’s looking less and less likely that SCO will be able to hold out that long.

–jeremy