Is your complaint 'Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents"'?
If so, this seems like very reasonable 'leave us alone' money that absolutely shouldn't be required but I can completely understand why they paid that to make the problem go away as a business decision in the world we currently live in. I'd probably have done the same myself.
Why criticise them for protecting themselves?
Do you think this funded SCO's legal activities further? $6M seems like a very very small amount for this kind of legal action and I can't imagine it funded anything except the paperwork required to get them to pay it. How many corporate lawyers does $6M pay for? Not many.
More than the $6M direct from Microsoft, was them using their influence to acquire more than an order of magnitude more cash from VC funds.
> I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar.
> ...
> Microsoft also indicated there was a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar "like" entities to help us get signifigantly more money if we want to grow further or do acquisitions
They offered to underwrite a 50 million dollar investment in a lawsuit and helped them raise 10s of millions more to fund what they knew enough to know was a felony pump and dump scam and a criminal attack on their competitors.
There isn't much daylight between what they did and a restaurateur paying the mafia to burn their competitor out of business if the mafia employed arsonists so incompetent they tried to effect their crime in broad daylight with zippos.
Keep in mind that while people are talking about the new and improved Microsoft that current ceo Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 whereas this whole SCO debacle begins 10 years later while he was working in a leadership role within Microsoft.
The criminal culture never left Microsoft and their current leadership is at best tolerant of criminal acts.
Dang. In all this time, I've always wondered why it was worth the money to pursue this litigation. I knew that the execs at SCO were making money through the whole thing, but I never paid attention to the stock price, and insider trading. That makes a lot of sense. It's probably too hard to go back and research that angle now. Do you have any links to such information?
I think you are going too far. Microsoft has been using tons of immoral and unethical actions, but most of the time they were trying to cover their asses and avoid doing anything illegal. Of course their aggressive strategy means they were often investigated and lost their cases in court, but in this particular case, I bet they played it in a way that nobody could make a legal case against them, even though what they did is public knowledge.
AFAIK, microsoft was never threatened by SCO and the payment was entirely voluntary. So, they were effectively giving money to a group that was attacking open source and free software.
Maybe you know more than I do, but Microsoft has always had services running on unix-like systems - even back then I'm sure they had Linux servers in places. So they know they would have been next. $6M was just administrative money for them back then and they would have just paid it to make it a non-issue.
And again, $6M isn't really funding any serious legal action, is it? A couple of lawyers' lunch expenses, maybe!
It seems TSG was bleeding around $7M per quarter, and legal fees with Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP were capped at $31M [0]. Microsoft seems to paid more than $6M, eg. this article [1] cites $16.6M figure. It should be possible to check these amounts in SEC fillings, but it is cumbersome, there isn't single summary table but multiple fillings mention various payments in different quarters. [2]
It seems that licensing fees from Microsoft were not insignificant part of litigation costs.
I'm 32 and the original SCO drama was _barely_ within my comprehension at the time it occurred: another thread reminded me of it, the poster seemed overwrought, my first reaction was "hah that's silly, it wasn't _that_ conspiratorial"...spent about an hour doing a deep dive on it, and yeah, it was pretty bad, $8 mil is the tip of the iceberg. Lotta intentional nonsense, and I'm not exactly wedded to FOSS ideals
The current CEO of Microsoft was an executive VP with then 10 years of work with Microsoft at the beginning of the scandal as well it seems a strange ask to for us to imagine that an executive who looked the other way during criminal conspiracy is supposed to be leading the new more ethical Microsoft.
I think they are still in the Embrace and Extend phases, putting a lot of work into the Linux kernel to make sure it plays well with Windows machines so bringing Azure tons of money, adding WSL so that devs don't need to switch to bare-metal Linux in order to do their work, making GitHub's position stronger so that all Open Source development is concentrated on their platform. This is all a coherent strategy aiming at maximizing value while controlling the situation (making sure Linux is unbootable after you install Windows next to it etc.).
What would be the first stages of the Extinguish stage? If I were them, I would start from neutralizing Stallman. He is the pillar of Free Software, a smart hacker who created GCC and devoted his life towards values that are completely at odds with Microsoft's vision. I would use every occasion to discredit him and eliminate him from exerting any influence.
