Schadenfreude

From Wikipedia, Schadenfreude is a German word meaning "pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune."

I'm experiencing immense amounts of Schadenfreude. Normally, I feel a lot of sympathy and a bit of empathy for those who have misfortune visited upon them. But, not today, not earlier this week and certainly not tomorrow for SCO. I am gleeful about SCO's misfortunes of late.

For those of you who haven't heard, SCO has filed for bankruptcy. I was immediately reminded of the Wizard of Oz film and the singing of "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead." Of course, while too much schadenfreude is probably not good for one's immortal soul I'm going to continue to take pleasure in this particular delight just a bit longer.

On the golf course we use the phrase, "There's a lot of golf left." It means that no matter how well ahead one is there are still plenty of opportunities to derail the progress. There's still a lot of golf left to play with SCO but we're certainly nearing the end of this particular disaster.

Some of the articles are pretty funny such as this one that says that SCO blames Linux for their failure. What's particularly ironic about this particular article is that I thought that SCO was going to be a Linux company before their management team completely screwed up. I remember meeting with Darl and company at one of their customer meetings years ago and working with them to help make SCO a successful Linux company. Once they turned their back on Linux and made their sensationalized allegations they just couldn't understand why no one wanted to do business with them. They couldn't understand why those of us committed to open-source and Linux wouldn't return their phone calls.

Sheer idiocy is never easy to watch. One feels embarassed and wants to turn away when witnessing fellow humans make asses of themselves.

SCO's board chose to keep Darl and the other leaders who chose this disastrous strategy. As a result, the board, the managers and the shareholders deserve all that they get which, hopefully, will be nothing.

I guess I'm in a movie kind of mood but I'm also reminded of the opening to Trainspotting. The opening narrative sets the stage for the entire movie as Mark "Rent-Boy" Renton describes his reasons for choosing heroin instead of life.

Darl's opening narrative could be, "Choose success. Choose a business plan. Choose a top team. Choose a passion. Choose good relations, low costs and a future for my employees. Choose a starter product with a future. Choose a big idea with a range of options. Choose products with matching support. Choose happy customers and building a stellar reputation. Choose a future based on a sound foundation...But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose success. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got Boies, Schiller & Flexner?"