This is the quote of the day:
"BayStar Capital looks to invest in growth-oriented firms with strong management, substantial market opportunity and solid, comprehensive business plans, and we believe that all of those fundamentals are in place for SCO to succeed," said Lawrence Goldfarb, a BayStar general partner.
This is apparently Goldfarb's justification for funding SCO's strategy of litigating everyone who uses Unix.
Mr. Goldfarb: You must be a lawyer, otherwise you would understand that lawyers do not create products. Lawsuits do not generate revenue for companies, nor do they increase marketshare. They do not make a company's products better. They, in short, do not contribute in any way to a growing healthy economy.
Lawsuits are used to redress wrongs, and to establish a company's rights to do certain things. SCO has no marketshare, no sales, and no product worth buying, nor do they, as has been amply proven with the evidence shown thus far, have any wrongs to redress. For you to say that they are "growth-oriented" and "have a strong business plan," is tantamount to saying, "We believe that we can profit from SCO's strategy of litigating other market players."
You, Mr. Goldfarb, are a thus a parasite. You are not investing your clients' money in order to provide capital to a growth business; you are engaged in risky speculation on the outcome of several lawsuits, any one of which could put your clients' $50M in the hands of IBM, RedHat or a later comer to the field if SCO loses. Sooner or later, you will be called to account for that. If I were one of your clients, it would be sooner.
Posted by brent at 21:14To whomever wrote this letter,
For your information, Mr. Goldfarb was as is a lawyer as well a a brilliant and strategic investor. Whatever his motives are for investing in the SCO group may be uncertain, but who the hell are you to critize this? What companies or hedge funds have you recently aquired? How many million dollar deals do you lay out on the table a month?
Well, Kari, considering that since Goldfarb made his investment, SCO has lost over half its value, I'd suggest that my criticisms were well-founded. I suppose even brilliant investors make stupid mistakes when someone like Microsoft dangles enough money in front of their noses.