An anonymous reader writes: The true state of SCO shows through when reading between the lines of Darl McBride's yearly e-mail to SCO's Partners. Or in McBride's own words: 'the vantage point of the CEO's office provides a perspective that other are not giving.'
First, McBride points out that "SCO is committed to enhancing and innovating our product lines and seeing them evolve." As proof of this, he points out that "in recent years" they have released UnixWare 7.1.4 (in May 2004) and OpenServer 6 (in June 2005). But no examples of major releases or updates provided in 2006 or any planned for 2007.
Second, systems are provided by Dell, HP and Intel to be certified for SCO UNIX. This begs the question, can a company honestly claim to be pro-Linux and continue to seek certification from SCO at the same time?
But best of all, McBride admits that funding the court cases against IBM and Novell is dwindling. "While we expect to continue incurring legal expenses in 2007, our expectation is that those expenses will be less than they have been in prior years."
For those familiar with how bad SCO has been hemmoraging cash, it might seem odd to hear McBride claim that SCO is "committed to operating [their] UNIX business on a cash flow positive basis and [they] will make any necessary adjustments in our business in 2007 to accomplish that." How are they going to do that? It is not like McBride is willing to work for a dollar per year like Google's CEO. But to put this claim into context, the e-mail ends with "this letter is subject to the safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements including in our Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on January 12, 2007."
At the end of the day, the company that could theoretically indemnify it's intellectual property (did they ever actually provide a written indemnification?) can not claim it will make money in the future without a disclaimer.