Steeds meer bedrijven kopen licentie bij SCO

--- From the mailbox of chris sontag
From: Mike Anderer
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003
To: csontag@sco.com
CC: Bob Bench
Subject: Conversation Friday

Chris Sontag, the recipient of this mail, is Vice-President and general manager of the SCOsource, responsible for (as his company page puts it) "overseeing the development and licensing of SCO's immense intellectual property holdings.".

I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we
should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial as it is for go to makerket work and some licences. I know we can do this , if everyone stays on board and still wants to do a deal. I just want to
get this deal and move away from corp dev and out into the marketing andfield dollars....In this market we can get $3-5 million in incremental deals and not have to go through the gauntlet which will get tougher next week with the SR VP's.

This is the smoking gun. We now know that Microsoft raised $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call this morning (03 Mar 2004) their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today.

The "$16 to $20" is probably $16 to $20 million in cash, and since this memo is five months old that deal is almost certainly completed by now. This means it's possible SCO has burned through as much as $30 million in just a year of barratry.

But there is a more interesting (if farfetched) possibility. Just a couple of days after October 12 SCO's stock price rose sharply from $16 to $20. I don't think the context of the memo supports this reading...but was Microsoft so confident of its ability to manipulate SCO's stock price that it offered to do that as a payoff?

The part that starts "I just want" is interesting, too. It looks as though Anderer is talking about shopping for a wealthier patron group within Microsoft's corporate hierarchy; SCO has been taking money from Microsoft "corp dev" (probably "corporate development") but the gauntlet of Microsoft's senior vice-presidents is about to make that more difficult. He thinks they can get more money from "marketing and field dollars". Later paragraphs suggest that he's talking about talking co-marketing money out of different groups within Microsoft, probably their Corporate Marketing and Field Marketing groups.

The new memo was published to the Web on late Wednesday by open-source advocate Eric Raymond. The memo was picked up by the Slashdot Web site on Thursday morning.

Blake Stowell, SCO's director of communications, acknowledged that the leaked memo is real.

But, Stowell claimed that pundits had mischaracterized the memo's context. "We believe the e-mail was simply a misunderstanding of the facts by an outside consultant who was working on a specific unrelated project to the BayStar transaction and he was told at the time of his misunderstanding. Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."

SCO acknowledged the memo but dismissed both the author's and Raymond's conclusions. BayStar Capital's $50 million investment in SCO wasn't due to Microsoft's participation, said Blake Stowell, a spokesman for Lindon, Utah-based SCO.

But Jones said his company, in the oil and gas industry, didn't sign the agreement because it supported the legitimacy of SCO's claims. And it didn't pay much: Seven of the company's 100 servers run Linux, and Questar paid about $5,000, he said.