You probably can't short SCOX because there aren't enough shares around to borrow, but it looks like a sure bet. With the stock trading at USD 10.15 today, still up about USD 2.00 from recent lows, it looks like it's near the top of a dead-cat bounce.

Why are we guessing this? First, the Wall Street Journal characterizes the SCO v. Everyone lawsuit as a 'Patent Shakedown', also commenting:

"SCO says it won't identify all the infringing code in Linux because Linux developers would quickly replace it. But isn't that exactly what someone alleging a legal injury should, for starters, want -- to stop being injured? Damages for past injuries can always come later. Or maybe SCO knows that if it laid out its cards, people would just walk away from the table laughing at its hand -- rather than pay a license fee."

SCO has released a statement about its insider trades, which they supposedly planned after the lawsuit was filed; unfortunately for them, this will probably end up as evidence in lawsuits against them (bottom paragraph), because they had indeed already hired lead attorney Boies in January as well as talking about what strategy they were going to use to get revenue from Linux users.

Despite McBride's recent statement about the silent majority of IT people being behind SCO, many have now expressed their views to the contrary. Linus Torvalds and Bruce Perens are now voicing strong opinions with evidence that the code in question cannot be in dispute because of well-documented release under the GPL license. Here is more explanation on the issue from LWN, and more juicy details from the Groklaw blog.

If anyone in the US is feeling generous, perhaps they could send Daryl and his buddies copies of Alice in Wonderland and Grimm's Fairy Tales, which includes the story of 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. The whole gift would be as little as USD 1.50 plus postage to Utah, and reading these would probably help them understand what's really going on.

Willy Smith, reporting from Costa Rica

Someone has been kind enough to inform me that The Emperor's New Clothes" was in fact written by Hans Christian Andersen; sorry, it's been a long time since I've read the story myself. So here's the new link. Note also that it would bump Daryl's gift up by 11 cents as the paperback is USD .86 instead of USD .75.