SCO skipping the tough questions

Groklaw has a link and writeup about a report from Chris Preimesberger about SCO's bad numbers for the fourth quarter of 2004, but a puzzling "optimistic" outlook. Preimesberger notes something that I've long been aware of, namely that SCO is very picky about who gets to ask questions during their quarterly conference calls:

Something I want to mention about this conference call: No hardball questions were asked. SCO Group undoubtedly selected only certain people it expected to ask fluff questions, and fluff questions they got. So we couldn't get to the bottom of these incongruencies. If I were a stockholder, I'd be very angry at this opacity.

I noted the same thing in my last writeup of the SCO conference call for Linux Weekly News.

Pamela of Groklaw asks if other reporters were on the call, but unable to ask a question. Absolutely. I've sat in on several SCO conference calls, as has Jon Corbet of LWN, and SCO has never deigned to allow either of us to ask a single question though I have signaled at every call that I wished to ask a question, multiple times. I'm sure that Jon has as well. It should also be noted that SCO's conference calls have been getting progressively shorter each quarter, yet they keep citing "time constraints" as a reason for not taking more questions.

I bring this up because the SCO story still looms large in the discussion about open source. There are still those who cite SCO as an example of the "dangers" of open source, as if SCO's litigation proved something.

I agree with Preimesberger If I were a SCO stockholder, I'd be calling for the company to answer the tough questions.