Senior vice president bails from SCO

Indeed, he's disappeared from SCO's Executive Profiles here (although a cached version of his profile webpage is still available at time of writing here).

His departure wasn't entirely unanticipated. Insider trading filings reported over a month ago that Bawa had sold all his SCO holdings.

On June 3, he sold 15,000 shares at $6.00 per share, disposing of all his directly owned stock. On June 4, he exercised all his outstanding options on 7,916 shares at $1.20 per share, turning them immediately at $6.60 per share. These transactions disposed of all of his stock holdings listed on SCO's 2003 proxy statement, netting Bawa just less than $133,000 minus transaction fees. Not much, considering that his annual salary for 2003 was reportedly $178,000.

It's rumoured that Bawa will officially leave SCO at the end of July and continue to advise the company through August. So far, SCO hasn't issued any announcement, nor has a successor been named or mooted.

As head of engineering, he was presumably in an excellent position to evaluate the source code underpinning SCO's legal claims against IBM, Linux, and non-SCO Unix operating systems in general. That he decided to leave rather than stay aboard in hopes of sharing in $3 billion of IBM's money speaks volumes about the real value of SCO's strategy.

Don Marti, Editor of Linux Journal dryly remarked on the linux-elitists mailing-list, "I guess a company that doesn't engineer anything or serve anyone doesn't really need a "Senior Vice President, Engineering and Global Services"...." µ