Senior vice president bails from SCO

SHARPER EYES than mine have noticed that Opinder Bawa, SCO's Senior Vice President of Engineering and Global Services, appears to be bailing out.

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