SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing

Stony Stevenson writes "SCO Group CEO Darl McBride is now claiming that competition from Linux was behind the company's filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 'In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix.""

Comments

Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Kelson]

Okay, I'll grant that competition from Linux distributors probably has taken business away from their Unix offerings. (Not that there's a problem with that, it's just the way markets work.) Of course, I'm sure their "we'll sue our customers!" antics didn't help, as the distributors behind such Unix varieties as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX etc. don't seem to be in quite such dire straits.

But let's not forget that a few years back, this SCO was known as Caldera. They were a Linux distributor. They were a founding partner in UnitedLinux. Then they bought Unix -- well, they bought something -- and changed their name to sound like the old SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), and refocused their business on Unix and lawsuits.

Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

To pull out an old analogy, it's like they started out as an automobile company, and then decided to switch to the buggy-whip business -- and now they're blaming the automobile companies for their business failures.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know that if they'd stuck with the Caldera name and business model that they would have succeeded. After all, how much space is there really for commercial support in the Linux space. Maybe they'd have succeeded, maybe not - but their legal antics and operatic press releases made them look like maniacs. And that is entirely their own fault.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[CRCulver]

Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[moranar]

Still, it's hard to be doing worse than SCO is doing these days, isn't it? Even with a turd of a distro, they might have done something better.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay...I've been reading the comments, and I am not sure if everyone is on the same page. I'll do a summary super quick for some, and don't blast me is any of it is wrong, its just want I remember. Bell Labs created Linux a while ago, then it sold to AT&T, which in turn sold their Linux stuff to SCO. So for the past few years SCO went on a Suing spree trying to file a suit against anyone who was using Unix or Linux. They are even claim that anyone(yes, even end users) who has ever used Linux owes them $750 for a license. They claim that Linux was created from stolen code of their Unix. They went after IBM, Chryster, Sun, anyone with deep pockets. And how were they getting the money for this....Microsoft gave $50million to another company (i forget what the name was), who in turn, gave it directly to SCO. It was in Microsoft's best interest because a company was suing all of their competitors.

In one of their court cases, the court order SCO to release SCO's code to the court so the court could compare it to the Linux code, ect..., SCO claimed that Unix was propietary, and that they couldn't release it to the court without hurting themselves, so they withheld their code, and the case was thrown out. I think everyone knows that SCO is a big joke, that is looking to make money from nothing. I know a few years ago, when they were making money, it was from their stock, and people getting into the hype. I'm sure the SCO execs all the majority of the ppl who bought the stock, and they probably sold it already while it was high a few years back.

From above, I forget who Caldera was, I am too lazy to look it up. I wrote a paper two years back on this, I can probably find it and upload some of it when I get home from work.

Just my two cents...and a little clarification about a few thing.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[vthokie69]

They would at least have the cash that they used on the lawyers.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[LWATCDR]

When Caldera first came out it was actually pretty interesting. It just died on the vine over time. Heck I really thought Red Hat was over rated and it has managed to do well. I think Caldera could have been a big hit if they had managed it correctly. They had DR-DOS so they could have bundled a Dos runtime environment. While by 96 DOS was pretty dead that would have been a nice feature for some users.They could have been a contender but failed to find any focus.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Perl-Pusher]

AT&T sold their UNIX to Novell not SCO

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[gerrysteele]

> Bell Labs created Linux In your paper did you note that Linux and Unix are not even close to being the same? You use the term linux as if it is a synonym for UNIX. Torvalds has always owned the copyright to Linux.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[MBGMorden]

I don't know. Maybe I'm just looking at the past with nostalgia, but I used Caldera for a while and it certainly wasn't too bad. I remember the install being rather easy and it was very easy to get Wordperfect working on it.

In contrast, the first distro I ever tried was Debian and 12 years later despite being extremely proficient at Linux now I still get a little skeerd at the thought of installing Debian (so instead I use Gentoo :S). Lets just say that for a kid who knew only MS-DOS (I had Windows 3.1 but spent little time in that environment - it was pre-internet for me and the DOS terminal programs just worked so much better :)), and found this "Debian Linux" thing as a set of 7 floppy images on a local BBS, it wasn't very user friendly (I DID get it installed, but after it booted up to the prompt I was stuck with a nagging feeling of "Now what do I do?" :). Luckily it wasn't too much longer before I was able to get ahold of an early copy of Redhat on CD, which was a lil easier to get up and going (and connected to the net!). Once I had access to the internet Linux got easier :).

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ, tell your uncle Clem to stop using radiators to make his moonshine. That stuff can cause permanent damage.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Monchanger]

As has been mentioned over and over, the SCO business model of recent seems less about product development and more about legal + accounting maneuvering.

The SCO strategy has been fairly consistent: call themselves as a victim and look for someone to pity them. Fortunately, few bought the act, and most have recognized the cheap trick for what it is. Hopefully, this new tantrum won't yield better results for them.

McBride, there's no crying in business.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[foobsr]

Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

Yes.

"Ransom Love, the immediate successor to Sparks, engaged in a famous spat with Richard Stallman, after Love had announced that Caldera would drop the GNU GPL (General Public License), the most common free software license, for future products because it was holding back its business. Love claimed: "We add value to Linux, so it can become successful. We integrate Linux in back office systems and we do all the marketing that's necessary. Did Richard Stallman ever invest $100 million (£50 million) in Linux? We did." Love asserted that the free software movement had "no clue" about marketing, and doesn't realise that "someone must pay for it", to which Stallman's curt response was that "Caldera's not a free software company at all. They are just a parasite.""
(c.f., emphasis mine)

CC.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I do know that Linux and Unix are definitely not the same. If I used one of them in the wrong context, then I apologize. The paper I wrote, it is more politically correct than this Comment I posted. It was from a long time ago. I believe my source came straight from the Harvard Business Review, I may still have the article at home, I'm sure it would make an interesting re-read.

On further clarification from another comment, I remember something about Unix being sold, but I must have mis-cited who bought it, so thank you for the clarification. I only remember SCO purchasing the rights to one of the OS's, and then claiming they owned all flavors of it.

I thought Torvalds only owned the copyright to the Linux Kernel, not to Linux.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Curtman]

I used Caldera for a while and it certainly wasn't too bad. I remember the install being rather easy

Yeah, and it let you play pacman while you waited for it to install. That was the most innovative thing Caldera ever did as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Curtman]

I thought Torvalds only owned the copyright to the Linux Kernel, not to Linux.

He owns neither. "Linux" (not the kernel) isn't a real product, it's just what a GNU distro running on the Linux kernel is called. The copyright on Linux the kernel isn't in one persons hands. Many many many people collectively have copyright on the kernel itself. You have to look at individual files within the source tree to see who has copyright on what.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[davidsyes]

AND....

They forgot to hire Chuck Norris as their multi-role driver/defender/bodyguard/etc....

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and it let you play pacman while you waited for it to install. That was the most innovative thing Caldera ever did as far as I'm concerned

So that is where they got their ideas on how to run SCO.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[TheRaven64]

While by 96 DOS was pretty dead that would have been a nice feature for some users. DOS was dead in 1996? A lot of businesses were still relying on DOS programs back then, and many of those that weren't were using Win16 apps. A DOS runtime environment that could have run Windows 3.11 would have been an interesting alternative to Windows 95.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Kelson]

Yes, I do know that Linux and Unix are definitely not the same. If I used one of them in the wrong context, then I apologize. The paper I wrote, it is more politically correct than this Comment I posted.

It's not a matter of political correctness, it's a matter of factual correctness. If you'd said, "Microsoft released OS/2 in 1995," and meant Windows 95, that would be a factual error, and you'd get called on it just the same as you did for saying that Bell Labs created Linux.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[just_forget_it]

You forgot after switching to the buggy-whip business, they then sued the largest automaker, and threatened to sue customers of that automaker, claiming that said auto maker stole buggy-whip technology and implemented it into automobiles.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[dascritch]

As said Linus : Smoking Crack Officially . No a good business practice, imho

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[PitaBred]

Linus Torvalds owns the trademark for Linux. He has copyright on large portions of the kernel code as well, but that's a different matter entirely. Anyone who has code in the Linux kernel has a partial copyright for it, even though it's released under the GPL. There's no assigning of copyright to Linus when you submit code to the kernel.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[sjames]

The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.

I was at an enthusiasts meeting once and a rep from Caldera was there. That was the first and only time I've ever seen anyone unable to GIVE copies of any Linux distro away.

Their big idea at the time seemed to be recreating the "great" idea of the Windows registry as a combined config file in /etc. IIRC, the distro itself looked very much like the previous version of RedHat with the logos changed (perfectly legal) and nothing added but extra support for mounting a Novell server.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[WindBourne]

After all, how much space is there really for commercial support in the Linux space.

Hmmmm. At the time that they pulled this shit, basically, it was Redhat, Suse, and Caldera as the big players. Now, it is redhat, Suse/Novell, Ubuntu's company, Oracle, IBM, HP, SGI, Mandriva, etc. It would appear that the market is really expanding with a large amount of support. OTH, the support for Unix is shrinking.

But then again, I do not believe that they ever intended to expand the Unix market. I think taht they intended to do what MS/Sun paid them to do; fight Linux in the courts. That almost certainly made them a GREAT deal more money that reselling Unix ever could.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Amouth]

my first was Caldera - i later found the wonder of slackware.... and still use slack

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[sjames]

While by 96 DOS was pretty dead that would have been a nice feature for some users.

A lot of games at the time ran in DOS and ran fine in DOSemu. That's one reason MS came out with DirectCrack.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Bake]

Ah, yes. Microsoft came out with DirectX because Linux and other Unix-like operating systems were cutting so heavily into the DOS/Windows marketshare

Or (probably more realistically) they came out with DirectX to create a single hardware agnostic development platform for games to make it easier to crank out more games faster.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[rbanffy]

It would be damn hard to sell a new DOS license to run legacy apps even in 1996. Remember: it was trivial to transfer DOS from one machine to another and those pesky OEM limitations that forbid you to install a copy of Windows on another computer did not exist for DOS. As for performance, any 1996 computer was wicked fast at running most legacy DOS apps. Quite a few did even crash because of the excessive speed. Remember - those were the days of the "turbo" button.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[TheRaven64]

I'm not saying sell DOS, I'm saying sell Linux with a DR DOS-based runtime environment, which can run Windows 3.11 in a window in X. It would have been a nice migration path for a lot of companies.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Alyred]

Wait... Wasn't Pacman a licensed property back then?

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[GooberToo]

They were a Linux distributor.

But before that happened, IIRC, SCO's entire VAR channel gave them the finger because SCO refused to do anything to help them remain loyal. As a result, almost everyone one of them went to IBM or Linux; mostly to Linux. Long story short, SCO decided they would not support their sales, support, and consulting channel...and are now surprised they have no business as a result. SCO has no one to blame but SCO.

Hell, SCO's Nonstop Clustering (NSC) product sucks...it doesn't work worth crap. A single node failure can result in wiping/crashing the ENTIRE cluster. After which a re-installation on every node in the cluster is required. I think Compaq/HP got tired of dealing with this loser technology and started distancing themselves from it. I don't recall who actually did the development on that product, Compaq/HP or SCO.

To make matters worse, SCO is a real nightmare to support. AIX, OSF (Dec Unix), HPUX, Linux, so on, are all so easy in comparison. All together, it's almost impossible to have anything good as a result of using SCO (no support (lost their VARs), limited applications (people stopped developing on SCO because the platform sucks for developers), no real cluster solution (NSC) , contrary to best efforts by marketing. So what's left? Only a dope wouldn't move on to a better platform.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[LWATCDR]

Notice I said pretty dead which means a little bit alive. Hence it would have been a nice feature for some users.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

Or (probably more realistically) they came out with DirectX to create a single hardware agnostic Windows-specific development platform for games to make it easier to crank out more games faster and ensure they only ran on Windows. OpenGL wouldn't do because it was cross-platform.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[confused one]

My sentiments exactly. When I read the headline, I snickered to myself as I thought, "But they used to be Caldera..."

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Crayon Kid]

Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

With McBride to lead them and stupid tactics like this? They could be in the business of gold falling from the sky and still fail.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[sjames]

At the time, Unix wasn't on their radar and they'd probably never heard of Linux. On the other hand OS/2 was on their radar. For that matter, Win3.11 was still in use and ran ON DOS. The last thing they wanted was a bunch of games that didn't need Windows 95 to run.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[RobertLTux]

okay first thing you are forgetting the BSD/ATT code split (and a rather nasty lawsuit) then att? sold the rights THAT THEY HAD IN THE FIRST PLACE to Novell Novell in turn sold the licensing business BUT NOT THE COPYRIGHTS to a company that if you follow the shell game is now called The Sco Group.

Funny thing is they wrote the contract with a bail out clause if TSCOG went bankrupt (basically the money generated was considered to be Novells and merely held by TSCOG)

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Tetris you could play during the install, not pacman.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[falconwolf]

Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

From what I recall Caldera was loosing ground in selling Linux. Sure they were selling it but other distros passed them by and became bigger.

To pull out an old analogy, it's like they started out as an automobile company,

Is this part of a pun? Using an auto company as an example when SCO tried to sue one, Daimler Chrysler if I recall right.

Faclon

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[LaminatorX]

No no. That made Novell a lot more money. SCO is just holding it for them, except that they seem to not have all of it any more.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[AtlasAxe]

I started work for a Fortune 100 company in 1996 whose primary sales app was DOS-based until after 2000. We were buying plenty of copies of DOS at least until about 1998 (the app was updated to work in a command prompt under Windows 95/98 by that point, but still not converted into a Windows app). Big corporations will buy large quantities of legacy software to stay away from copyright issues.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[dbIII]

I'm sure they would have failed simply due to poor management for a technical company. Recall Darl's early joke - a powerpoint of some source code ruputed to be linux replaced with the symbol font, the comment "it's all greek to me!" then some comments about geeks. This and a few other incidents demonstrated an obvious contempt of techical people - and who else is going to be involved in the purchase of any kind of unix operating system now? Saying nasty things about your customers is no way to sell technical services.

Other weird stuff was things like a small company putting on a lavish presentation splicing Darl into the role of James Bond and linux users as some kind of evil threat. Subjecting potential customers to an expensive and suprisingly long presentation of what is really an in-joke best left for the office Christmas party is not going to impress the customers. He's the cardboard cut-out clueless barbarian manager pretending he has more staff and responsibility than the average high school principal.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[dbIII]

It was Tetris and they subcontracted that out to Trolltech of qt fame. I believe the installer including the game was a one person job.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[ultranova]

Notice I said pretty dead which means a little bit alive.

It is not dead which can prettily lie, and with strange aeons, only the ugly die ?-) Or were you referring to the undead ? Hmm... Seeing how I've seen japanese OS-tan porn, I'd say it's only a matter of time before someone there makes an erotic DOS-zombie flick.

"Conventional memory! Must eat conventional memoryyyy..."

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Simon Brooke]

The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.

As one of Caldera's first paying customers, I disagree. It was not a lot different from RedHat at the time, but had a good (Motif based, as I remember it) commercial desktop (this was before KDE or Gnome, remember), Word Perfect (this was before Open Office, remember), and a number of other good, useful, stable commercial UN*X packages bundled as well. Applixware was available at reasonable price (I know, I bought that too) and gave an office application suite as good as contemporary MS Office. OK, it wasn't a geek distro, but it was a really good commercial users distro.

The whole system was solid and stable and easy to use and to administer, and was more than a match for contemporary Microsoft operating systems. OK, Linux has come a long way since then - but if Caldera-SCO had put as much energy and money into improving their distro as they have into lawsuits I think they would be solidly successful now.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Calinous]

We still use some FoxPro, DOS based accounting applications today - and until about four years ago, there were little or no Windows-based accounting applications in Romania.
      Having a correctly running DOS component in their operating system might have been quite a big boost to their marketability, at least in some sectors.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Moderatbastard]

Bell Labs created Linux

If they had done, surely it would have been called 'Bellux'? Coincidentally, reading your post caused a similar word to spring to mind.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

"They were a Linux distributor. They were a founding partner in UnitedLinux."

So they played their part in their own downfall?

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[itwerx]

It is not dead...erotic DOS-zombie flick.

Please mod parent up.
      (I'm not sure why exactly, but anybody who can string together a post like that deserves some kudos!)

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[canuck57]

As has been mentioned over and over, the SCO business model of recent seems less about product development and more about legal + accounting maneuvering.

You hit the nail on the head. Except has SCO spent ANYTHING on development? If SCO spent one quarter the amount on development of their product as they spend on lawyers and BS they might have had something people really want to buy.

People bought into SCO ODT because it was cool, complete and had all the features. They haven't produced anything since, 17 years is a long time.

Its development has so stagnated that it is now a waste of download time to get it. Their UNIX fork is now stale and EOL. Other forks will live on.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[LWATCDR]

Actually it was a reference to the Princess Bride.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is exactly why it failed. No one finished the installation because they wanted to have the high score.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[Anonymous Coward]

The installer was Lizard, and I was the guy complaining to one of the men employed at Trolltech
about hardship installing Linux at a NUUG.no meeting. 6 to 12 months went by and I made my first Linux Intall with LIzard.
Straight into the Internet and the Epson printer worked out of the box.
I still think the installer is a stroke of a Genious.
First graphical installer for Linux that I saw.

Just works :-)

Greetings
Jim Oksvold

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[AlanS2002]

I don't know that if they'd stuck with the Caldera name and business model that they would have succeeded. After all, how much space is there really for commercial support in the Linux space. Maybe they'd have succeeded, maybe not - but their legal antics and operatic press releases made them look like maniacs. And that is entirely their own fault.

I know when they bought SCO there was a bit of a buzz about how this could result in SVR7 being open sourced and then Darl MacBride took over and everything changed. I hope that man is brought to justice sometime soon. At the very least he must be guilty of insider trading.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[AlanS2002]

Shit that should of read SVR4, typo.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[ahodgson]

Yeah, but not the cash that Microsoft paid them to go after Linux.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[mink]

I think they added USB support when they released Openserver 6.

first "SUCK IT SCO"

[Anonymous Coward]

suck it till it's as empty as your coffers

Tough noogies

[RollingThunder]

I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him.

Re:Tough noogies

[nomadic]

I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him.

I fail to see where he's claiming that he's guaranteed one. All he's describing in the bankruptcy filing is why SCO failed.

Re:Tough noogies

[Major Blud]

I wish someone could explain that to the RIAA.

Re:Tough noogies

[gowen]

Nobody's said otherwise. A bankruptcy filing is a statement of "here's why this company went under." And "we got outcompeted by X, Y and Z" is a pretty damn common reason.

Re:Tough noogies

[ivanmarsh]

No Kidding... SCO sold Linux for quite a while. They couldn't make it work so it's the rest of the industry's fault?

Perhaps they should have been working on their business model rather than sueing everyone... who do they think they are, Microsoft?

Re:Tough noogies

[mhall119]

And "we got outcompeted by X, Y and Z" is a pretty damn common reason. Sure sounds better than "We abandoned product X to sell product Y. Then other companies proved that selling product X was more profitable than selling product Y. We then spent a whole bunch of money suing those companies for selling product X and our own customers for using product X without paying us for our product Y, only to be told we didn't actually own product Y, and owed ass-loads of money to Company Z."

Re:Tough noogies

[gowen]

Oh, I agree. Bankruptcy filings get written by the soon-to-be-outgoing board. Unsuprisingly, they rarely say "This company folded because the outgoing board is almost completely incompetent and abandoned its core business in order to give all the company's assets to its lawyers."

Funny, that.

Re:Tough noogies

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you have read the federal legal code where in the MPAA and RIAA backed changes which do just that. The problem was that SCO wasn't in the "creative content" business (other than fabricating truths for legal briefs).

Re:Tough noogies

[orclevegam]

only to be told we didn't actually own product Y, and owed ass-loads of money to Company Z."

Actually they knew they owed ass-loads of money to Company Z, but they were hoping if they closed their eyes and imagined really hard that they didn't, that it would just sort of go away.

Baring that I'm sure they had some sort if twisted idea that after they won two metric fuck-tons of money from suing company A, and B, that they could then turn around and figure out some way to sue company Z, or at least annoy them enough that they forgot about all that money.

Re:Tough noogies

[timeOday]

Remember, McBride lives in an alternate universe where Linux beat SCO only because IBM infused Linux with UNIX code stolen from SCO. Granted, that's all proven totally false, but there is some consistency to his hallucinations.

Re:Tough noogies

[Zeinfeld]

Granted, that's all proven totally false, but there is some consistency to his hallucinations.

That is not quite accurate. McBride's allegations have neither been proven nor disproven. In fact they appear to fall into the category of 'not even wrong' as in 'not a testable legal theory'.

Re:Tough noogies

[renimar]

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

Robert Heinlein

Re:Tough noogies

[Goodgerster]

"I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him."

You've obviously never encountered the recording, television or movie industries.

Developers vs. Lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they spent all that money on development instead of on lawyers?

He will blame...

[AltGrendel]

...everyone but himself. What an ego.

Re:He will blame...

[CaseCrash]

Yeah, he's got to have a pretty low opinion about himself to think he couldn't possibly have enough of an influence for it to be his fault

Re:He will blame...

[Cheesey]

I'm impressed to hear him speaking the truth for a change. Paraphrasing: "we're out of business because Linux does what we did, but for less money, and more flexibly."

But I still think he's a dick for trying to solve that problem by suing. Adapting to Linux would surely have been cheaper than all this legal action. They might even have made a profit...

Translation:

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe I'm losing to this guy!

--Darl McBride

Microsoft distributing Linux?

[querist]

Since when have Microsoft been distributing Linux? I suspect that Mr. McBride is mistaken or perhaps this is simply a despirate grab at anyone who has money. (Note he did not go after Ubuntu, etc. - only "deep pockets")

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[glop]

Microsoft has an agreement with Novell to distribute Suse Linux. They are therefore in the business of distributing Linux (see the whole GPL3/Microsoft/Novell/Patent deal controversies). Of course, I wouldn't bet that they really push hard to distribute Linux.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[Kelson]

I did a double-take too, but if you look at it more closely, he doesn't say Microsoft distributes Linux. What he says is that other OSes including Linux took away their marketshare. Then he lists a bunch of companies that provide OSes, including Microsoft. So he's talking about Windows in that case.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[gosand]

(Note he did not go after Ubuntu, etc. - only "deep pockets")

Not to mention that Ubuntu wasn't really any kind of force at that time.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[Shuntros]

What are you smoking?

Microsoft have been distributing Linux since 2003! Get with the program.

http://www.mslinux.org/

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[mringenb]

It is not important to SCO if Microsoft is actively distributing Linux or a UNIX derivative, Microsoft was one of the first big companies to pay SCO for a UNIX license. There was some suspicion that Microsoft was not really interested in doing anything with the license but was interested in legitimizing SCO's claim to have the right to license UNIX which in turn could harm the UNIX and Linux communities. From todays vantage, it is easy to see that Microsoft could not loose if it bought a license, either SCO beats down Linux and more people turn to Microsoft or SCO goes under and has to refund the money.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[el_gordo101]

From todays vantage, it is easy to see that Microsoft could not loose if it bought a license, either SCO beats down Linux and more people turn to Microsoft or SCO goes under and has to refund the money.
SCO will not have to refund any money to Microsoft, but they will have to pay royalties to Novel from the sale of the UNIX licenses to Microsoft, as per the agreement that they had with Novel at the time and as upheld by the court. Microsoft was just in the middle of this whole mess stirring up the pot and playing both sides against each other. Devious, under-handed, and brilliant, in an evil, Microsoft sort of way.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[bigbadunix]

RTFA, never was it alluded that Microsoft has been distributing Linux:


The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listedIBM ( IBM), Red Hat, Microsoft (MSFT), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."


That being said, I'm sure that Microsoft licenses portions of UNIX, which it has to pay for. I'm sure they just "borrow" code from the big fuzzy linux kernel and/or device drivers when needed, but that's just my opinion, and most people think I'm paranoid.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[legirons]

"Since when have Microsoft been distributing Linux?"

Since they sold coupons for Novell support?

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[Zeinfeld]

It is not important to SCO if Microsoft is actively distributing Linux or a UNIX derivative, Microsoft was one of the first big companies to pay SCO for a UNIX license. There was some suspicion that Microsoft was not really interested in doing anything with the license but was interested in legitimizing SCO's claim to have the right to license UNIX which in turn could harm the UNIX and Linux communities. From todays vantage, it is easy to see that Microsoft could not loose if it bought a license, either SCO beats down Linux and more people turn to Microsoft or SCO goes under and has to refund the money.

Microsoft paid SCO less than a third of what IBM is reconed to have paid in legal fees.

As far as picking sides goes, Microsoft does best if there is a judgement against SCO which sets a precedent against Boies type of legal tactics: "we own the copyrights to your code but we are not going to say which parts". Note that is not the same as IBM wins since IBM can win without a precedent being set.

It is somewhat ironic then that the Microsoft judgement has indirectly resulted in Novell being able to bring bankruptcy proceedings.

Apparently SCO have $7.8 million in cash on hand. If they shut down operations today there might be enough to pay off the lawyers.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[hansraj]

despirate grab as in how German pirates grab?

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[lbft]

Microsoft used to distribute Windows Services for UNIX, and most of Services for UNIX lives on in Windows Server 2003 and certain versions of Vista under various names. That could potentially be a factor in the decision-making process of someone who's considering something like UnixWare.

Re:Microsoft distributing Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bankruptcy has many causes, but in SCO's case, the primary cause was an ill-founded high risk litigation strategy, and continuing it, when substantive, legally admissible, factual evidence was missing or never existed.

Now all that remains is the epilog, and how much damaging information the successful plantiffs can post on the internet, and IF there was any insolvency issues known before filing.

"Staying the course" eh ?

[unity100]

STILL stiff neck and scheming up until the end.

lawyers of this company should be hanged in order to prevent more exploits in u.s. legal system.

Re:"Staying the course" eh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

RIAA has already hired all of the SCO lawyers.

Re:"Staying the course" eh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

just like the death penalty makes the u.s. have one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

oh wait ...

oh yeah?

[zsouthboy]

I, horse-and-buggy manufacturer, am being put out of business by those damn dirty car manufacturers!

Re:oh yeah?

[Osurak]

How exactly are you manufacturing horses? Must be a 'trade secret', eh?

Re:oh yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a bunch of horse carriage builders went into the car business. Remember the "Body by Fisher" emblem on Chevrolets of decades past? Fisher was a coachbuilder before they went into auto body manufacturing. If you think about it, there's not much difference between a Model T and a horse-drawn buggy than an extra pair of wheels and few other mechanical add-ons.

Re:oh yeah?

[Duhavid]

They self-manufacture. All you need are two of them.
Not just any two, though, curiously enough.
We have not figured that part out yet.

We will stay on it, so to speak, till we do.

Re:oh yeah?

[jtownatpunk.net]

It's usually "buggy whip" manufacturers that are cited in this type of reference. However, it's not a great argument as there must still be at least one buggy whip manufacturer in the world because someone has to be making the whips that are being sold today. I assume the rest transitioned into making props for the sexually deviant.

Competition killed SCO.

[khasim]

McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

So ..... McBride is blaming competition?

Re:Competition killed SCO.

[Pvt_Ryan]

My God.. STOP PRESS.. There are companies out there competing for market share..

If SCO couldn't see this is it any wonder that they are filing for bankruptcy???

Really indeed imagine that competors trying to put each other out of business. What is the world coming to??

Re:Competition killed SCO.

[MCO-C]

Give the man a break, Linux just killed SCO, you insensitive clod!

Re:Competition killed SCO.

[cpaalman]

Had they spent a little of the lawyer money on coming up with ways to stay *relevant* in a changing and evolving market they might have noticed that their competition has not stopped innovating. good bye, good riddance

Re:Competition killed SCO.

[mhall119]

So ..... McBride is blaming competition? Yes, apparently nobody ever told Darl that competing was a viable business model, he thought litigating was the only way.

Re:Competition killed SCO.

[thegnu]

So ..... McBride is blaming competition?
I think so, and my official response is (take note):

Is widdle McBwide gots a boo boo? Oh, noes! Wed me come ovew a kiss it and make it aww beddew.

Re:Competition killed SCO.

[mce]

Darl knew that full well back in 2003. He also knew, and this is what you are not getting, that he could not compete. Lots of Free Software and/or Open Source zealots don't get that. While they may be technical geniuses, many don't understand the economical aspects of it all. It's way too simplistic to think that "whenever the other guy is beating you over the head today, you just go out there change these and those technical or feature aspects, work a few more long nights for free, and compete until you beat him instead. And if that doesn't work, you just go back to start and loop the same procedure."

Given that they could not keep up the competition and knew it, the correct and honourable thing for SCO to do would have been to get out of this particular business and go do something else. SCO didn't get out, but that does not mean they were so stupid as to not know. Given that they wanted to stay in the business they were in, litigation as indeed the only their only option. Their big mistake was to think that they could make it stick.

Most people in these discussions make the SCO managers look like nitwits to dumb to hold a pen, let alone a keyboard. But that's doing them a service, because there is no law against being incompetent. There is, however, a bunch of laws against the kind of criminal tricks SCO employed and that is what they should be tackled on.

Damn Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn Microsoft and their support of Linux!

Re:Damn Microsoft

[joe 155]

lets not forget that for the purposes of the GPL v. 3, Microsoft is distributing linux through their voucher scheme - no need to let them get away with their responsibilities...

Excuse me...

[curmudgeous]

...while I laugh maniacally.

Re:Excuse me...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I will do the pointing! .... Okay some laughing too! BAHAHAHHAHAH!

Re:Excuse me...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that informative?

Re:Excuse me...

[ch0ad]

i think the fact that this got +3 informative makes it at least +4 funny

Re:Excuse me...

[jd]

Not until you mess up your hair and get the lightning bolt generator working. Maniacal laughs only work right if you have messed up hair and lightning bolts. Didn't they teach you anything in Mad Scientist 00000101?

Re:Excuse me...

[Moe1975]

Allow me to join you

Let's have us a /. chorus!

So he admitted

[microbee]

..the motive behind the baseless lawsuit: to hurt the competition?

Oh that Darl McBride!

[ackthpt]

McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years."

I suppose that's why they pay the Darl McBride the big bucks -- nothing gets by him.

The incredible Darl in action! Does anyone worry his next job will be working for their company?

The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix.""

Seems the logical approach would be for them to develop Unix and market it aggressively in return, rather than count on hitting the jackpot through the Lawsuit Lottery.

Seems they should have learned something from this example, but it does seem to strike everyone that there really never was an interest in growing the Unix market. It was all about suing IBM and other Linux distro makers.

In Other News: Br'er Rabbit informs us he's certain he can defeat the Tar-Baby if he could just get one foot free long enough to take another kick at it.

Re:Oh that Darl McBride!

[Billosaur]

Does anyone worry his next job will be working for their company?

Citing his vast experience, General Motors has announced Darl McBride is being named CEO, in hopes of ramping up flagging sales of GM products by suing Honda and Ford.

Re:Oh that Darl McBride!

[grasshoppa]

You joke, but that's exactly what's going to happen; Once darl is out of SCO, he'll stay low for a year or so, then back into the lime light he'll go, driving some other company head first into the ground.

Re:Oh that Darl McBride!

[spun]

Actually, I heard he was moving to Ford to help with their latest project.

Re:Oh that Darl McBride!

[sharkey]

General Motors has announced Darl McBride is being named CEO, in hopes of ramping up flagging sales of GM products by suing Honda and Ford.

Huh? Seems like Chevrolet and Cadillac would be higher on Darl's "must sue" list, given his track record.

Translation for those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

corporate cop-out speak:

McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."


We would like to blame other entities for our inability to make a quality product that can compete in a competative marketplace. Simple put they are responsible for our incompetance.

Re:Translation for those who don't know...

[mce]

Nope. Linux is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix" and as long as it doesn't do that in illegal ways - which it doesn't - that's a Good Thing (TM). The fact that Darl did not have a valid answer to that reality and that he was incompetent enough to think that his lawsuits would save him is utterly irrelevant as far as the trends in UNIX land are concerned.

All the people in this discussion that now go like: "No, we Linuxers sure had nothing to do with it. It's all Darl. We're in no way involved and it's all the other guy's fault for singlehandedly getting SCO into trouble." are doing the very thing they accuse him of: shifting away the "blame", using their own version of that so-called cop-out speak. But for the non-SCO parties in this comedy, there is no blame that needs shifting! Please stop feeling so insecure: SCO didn't just loose, the Linux community won! Now go strengthen that by building something even more use- and powerful, instead of all the whining about how Big Bad Darl incorrectly blames you for being stronger than he was!

SCO and Darl are virtually dead. Stop looking back and move on instead.

Re:Translation for those who don't know...

[shadowbearer]

"SCO and Darl are virtually dead. Stop looking back and move on instead."

  Not until their corpses start to stink.

  Some of us want to know more about the "license" deals that kept SCO financially alive for so long. We may just get that wish...

  This is just the first real battle. Just because we appear to have won it doesn't mean it shouldn't be analyzed as thoroughly as possible by "all the eyes" that can be brought to bear.

  I agree with everything you say, mostly, but - this isn't over, not by a long shot. We can't move on, not yet.

  And it *does* feel good to crow about it, dangit. :)

SB

Re:Translation for those who don't know...

[identity0]

HAHAHA Oh wow.

Saying Microsoft, Sun and IBM are beating you is like saying "Our Yugos are being outsold by Ford, Honda and Toyota".

...and why are they behind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Might have to do with the fact that they've been litigating instead of coding in the past few years.

SCO could have been with Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO is actually Caldera (actually they have nothing to do with the company Santa Cruz Operation which owned a version of Unix, apart from having bought some licensing rights from them). They were once one of the main distributors of Linux. They could have stuck with it. The only people to blame for this failure are the SCO management.

Or Maybe, Just Maybe...

[StickyWidget]

..the bankruptcy had something to do with the de-emphasis on the marketing, development, support, and other attributes of OpenServer and UnixWare, and the emphasis on filing lawsuits. Surprisingly enough, they didn't start doing this till Darl McBride became CEO.

Cause -> Effect.

~Sticky
/Just a thought, just a thought.

got to change with the times...

[mytrip]

This is as stupid as horse drawn buggy makers blaming automobile makers for going out of business. SGI didnt adjust. They went poof. IBM adjusted well to linux and is reaping benefits are oracle and other companies. SCO could have done well with linux by shifting an existing customer base and applications over a long time ago.

Re:got to change with the times...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

SGI didnt adjust.

Sure they did - they're called Nvidia now.

Re:got to change with the times...

[WilliamSChips]

Horse-drawn buggy makers started building car bodies and selling them to Ford and Chevrolet.

Ah poor McBride needs a Waaaambulance

[Trauma_Hound1]

Would he like some cheese with that whine?

SCO's reason for lawsuits?

[mhollis]

Wasn't the reason why SCO started suing everyone who was using Linux due to their assertion that the code in Linux was "stolen" from SCO Unix? So now they're claiming that competition from Linux (now that the courts see that the code was not, after all, stolen from them) is forcing them into Chapter Eleven?

And their assertions of this poverty are not due to the enormous amounts they have paid lawyers to prosecute ostensibly innocent companies?!

From now on, when I think of the term "pinhead" I'll think of the people at the soon-to-become-defunct SCO.

Re:SCO's reason for lawsuits?

[MightyMartian]

To be fair to them, SCO Unix was heading towards extinction, largely because of the competition from Linux, all the BSDs and Microsoft. Heck, IBM knew this and that's why they started putting so much effort into Linux and moving away from their own *nix operating system (AIX). That being said, guys like Sun seem to be doing alright, so it really comes down to business model, period. Caldera/SCO got taken over by a rather litigous bastard who altered the business model from "produce, maintain and sell support of operating system" to "try to extort licensing fees from IBM, or even better, simply get bought out so we can all get out of this mess".

I'll wager SCO was finished with or without the lawsuit. Without the lawsuit they may have a few more years, but SCO Unix died the death that some operating systems do; better and/or cheaper alternatives.

Re:SCO's reason for lawsuits?

[mhollis]

This is slightly OT, but I don't see suing people or purchasing other companies as "doing innovation." Any Board of Directors and stockholders who support a CEO who thinks buying other companies and/or suing other companies as a good idea deserve to see their stocks plummet.

SCO is now considered a "junk stock." I remember back when they used to innovate by hiring some of the best programmers in the business. I think the old way is the best.

Re:SCO's reason for lawsuits?

[Mr. Underbridge]

That being said, guys like Sun seem to be doing alright, so it really comes down to business model, period...I'll wager SCO was finished with or without the lawsuit.

The ridiculous thing is that they originally had a decent business model too; I'm not so sure they were toast had they maintained decent leadership. As I understand it, they were a leader in point of sale (POS, not to be confused with how that acronym is usually attributed to SCO) Unix boxes. Had they concentrated on this core business they would have been fine. They could have tweaked their OS for optimal stability, reliability, abd simplicity. They could have developed good add-on tools that would work well in that environment. But they got greedy, fell into bed with IBM, got tossed aside, and got bought out some weasels who bet the company on a lawsuit.

Re:SCO's reason for lawsuits?

[Esion Modnar]

I think of the term "pinhead" I'll think of the people at the soon-to-become-defunct SCO.

Now that's really unfair to pinheads...

Competition is GOOD

[extremescholar]

It's good for consumers and it's good for the economy. This is why we have anti-trust legislation!

Yep..probably

[Doonga2007]

"SCO Group CEO Darl McBride is now claiming that competition from Linux was behind the company's filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy." Too bad you didn't adjust your business model to compensate. Enjoy bankruptcy court, at least you you'll be comfortable on the inside of a courtroom considering how much time you've spent suing your customers in the past few years.

I would be led to beleive...

[dexomn]

It was the public debacle, wild accusations, circular logic, legal threats, loss of face, change of business model from products and services to litigation based, etc. that caused this. Not to mention an outrageously overpriced and stale product line. Call me a dreamer...

Sun sells Unix

[khb]

As best I can tell, and it's certified http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/802-1953/6i5uv2sif. I'll bet HP-UX and AIX are too. So is Daryl's claim t that his Unix isn't as marketable as other people's Unixes??

Re:Sun sells Unix

[DreadSpoon]

Sun also distributes (or did once, at least) Linux on some machines they sell (sold), plus they also went and Open Sourced their copy of UNIX.

Re:Sun sells Unix

[the_humeister]

Now that Mac OS X (some versions at least) has been certified as "Unix", Apple is also now selling "Unix." But then again all of these companies are basically selling hardware and services with the Unix part thrown in.

SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing

[Yaa 101]

Darl McBride is a loser, and a bad one...

Blaming Sun Microsystems?

[armanox]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Sun Solaris IS UNIX, so, how can UNIX be competing against UNIX?

Re:Blaming Sun Microsystems?

[BugAttack]

because they're two different companies?

Carriage Makers Blame Automobile for Slump

[Jane Q. Public]

How about some real news?

Re:Carriage Makers Blame Automobile for Slump

[Jane Q. Public]

"Off-Topic" ???
It migh be sarcastic, but it is very much on-topic! I hope in the future I can expect better moderation than that!

Because

[sdkramer]

it couldn't possibly be that SCO's entire business model was premised on suing everyone on the planet, and frankly that market's already been cornered by the RIAA.

Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but unless I am missing something, isn't solaris Unix? Isn't HP still selling HP-UX ? I think that is Unix too. Sounds like Unix still sells as long as you are servicing your customer's needs.

Re:Sun?

[Jane Q. Public]

No, Solaris is Solaris, HP-UX is HP-UX, and Unix is Unix. They are "similar". But they are not the same. One might argue over what the "real" differences are... and believe me, they have.

Re:Sun?

[notthe9]

HP-UX and Solaris comply with the Single UNIX Specification and are thusly properly called Unix.

Re:Sun?

[Jane Q. Public]

My bad, then. But I must ask: If that is so, how do they get away with being separately branded?

Re:Sun?

[PinkPanther]

Because Unix is a specification that many different operating systems may choose to implement. MS-Windows could, should they decide, which they won't, to implement the spec and call their OS a "Unix", but they won't (just so that we're clear on that).

Re:Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the Unix History page. Look at the diagram. Anyone telling you they know the full history of UNIX is lying. Period.

Currently UNIX is 2 things: a trademark and a concept. The trademark can be bought from the Open Group, the concept is basically enshrined in POSIX.

Wikipedia is your friend.

waaaaaa

[CraniumDesigns]

cry me a river SCO. it's called the market. adjust or die.

Other choice quotes

[Just Some Guy]

My favorites:

As a result of both the Court's August 10, 2007 ruling and our entry into Chapter 11, there is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.

and:

Revenue from the UNIX business decreased by $2,704,000, or 37%, for the three months ended July 31, 2007 compared to the three months ended July 31, 2006 and revenue from the UNIX business decreased by $5,103,000, or 23%, for the nine months ended July 31, 2007 compared to the nine months ended July 31, 2006.

and:

Revenue from our SCOsource business decreased from $31,000 for the three months ended July 31, 2006 to $0 for the three months ended July 31, 2007. Revenue also decreased from $95,000 for the nine months ended July 31, 2006 to $23,000 for the nine months ended July 31, 2007.

Ouch. To their credit (heh, I are teh funny), they managed to only lose $4.6M during that 9-month period, down from $12.9M a year earlier. Unfortunately, it looks like they're also out of things to cut.

Re:Other choice quotes

[Just Some Guy]

Oops! At first glance I thought the article was linking to their 10-Q filing that I'd just finished reading. Those quotes and numbers are taking from that form, not from the article.

Re:Other choice quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of SCO's legal actions, it looks like McBride and team have utterly failed at running this business. As a customer, I would never want to be engaged with a company that's headed by McBride... clearly they sunk SCO, and there were likely many long-term customers who felt the harsh pain of their mismanagement.

I'd much rather be a customer of IBM, or Novell, where I know that they'll stick behind me, the customer.

SCO is more than just bankrupt. SCO has lost all value to its current, former, and future customers. McBride- time to retire and move overseas.

Re:Other choice quotes

[Jaxoreth]

there is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.

I certainly doubt that you're going to continue to be a concern.

Re:Other choice quotes

[GuyverDH]

Unfortunately, it looks like they're also out of things to cut. Of course they have something left to cut - their own throats... uhrm - oh hell - nevermind...

Blame Everyone Else

[Nom du Keyboard]

Blame everyone and everything else for your failures. Couldn't possibly be your own decisions that are at fault for a now failing business model.

Re:Blame Everyone Else

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame everyone and everything else for your failures. Couldn't possibly be your own decisions that are at fault for a now failing business model.

Ditto for the RIAA.

Hopefully they will follow SCO's example all-the-way to Chapter 11 as well!

Maybe the RIAA could hire McBride?

I say this...

[securityfolk]

I say this with complete understanding of what a lowlife Darl McBride is. May he one day get a clue and join the rest of us who have evolved a cerebellum.

And now, without further ado:

Darl who?

Magnificently flawed business model

[Flying pig]

Assuming for the moment that the whole thing wasn't simply a Microsoft sock puppet, Darl McBride would seem to have failed very basic economics. SCO's competition was not Sun, HP, Red Hat etc. It was Microsoft. If he had actually wanted to grow the business, he would have known that when a type of product has relatively low market share, increasing the number of suppliers tends to increase that market share. If it's perceived that "everybody is doing Linux these days", cio and ceo are more likely to buy Linux.

So, reverting to the original argument, I suspect that McBride is not stupid, and that the whole thing is indeed a sock puppet. However, as a scam it is probably too arcane to be explained in a fraud trial. Expect McBride to turn up in a Microsoft advert before too long, explaining that it is the fate of all Linux companies to go bankrupt, so best stick with Windows.

Re:Magnificently flawed business model

[Kaenneth]

Expect McBride to turn up in a Microsoft advert before too long,

Like the Pets.com sock puppet?

Re:Magnificently flawed business model

[Dr Caleb]

No, more like Ed.

'nuff said.

Re:Magnificently flawed business model

[Anonymous Coward]

this clown swung for the fences with opm (other peoples' money).

if he won, he was worth 100s of millions.

if he lost, he still made millions in salary and stock sales.

this guy may be many things, but dumb is not one of them. most here wish the worst case scenario was millions still in our pockets.

Re:Magnificently flawed business model

[Anonymous Coward]

this clown swung for the fences with opm (other peoples' money).

What was the point of writing "opm" and then explaining what it stood for if you were not planning on using the shortened form anywhere else in your post?

Who needs a cookie???

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor Mr McBride, the whole IT business must be out to get him.

Somebody call the WAAAAAHHHHmbulance for him please!!!

Cue Scooby-Doo ending

[Spy der Mann]

"and it would have gone perfectly if it wasn't for these meddling kids!"

Oh, so it was nothing to do with....

[Andy_R]

Darl's decision to try and extort money from customers based on FUD and false claims that they owned Unix, Darl's decision to bet the company on a lawsuit against IBM despite having no evidence, Darl's decision to give up on Caldera's profitable Linux business, or indeed any other decisions that Darl may have made.

Oh, that's all right then Darl, we'll let you off then.

So, let me get this straight....

[downix]

You dropped your Linux support, now you're complaining that Linux is beating you? Would that not be akin to trading your ticket from a steam transport for a luxury suite on the Titanic?

Re:So, let me get this straight....

[BigBadBus]

Titanic was a steam transport.

Re:So, let me get this straight....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't beat them, stop joining them. Wait, that doesn't sound right.

Pfft, whatever.

[Pojut]

In the immortal words of Heavy Weapons Guy, Cry Some More.

Which goes to show, kids,

[Chabil Ha']

that suing that pants off people is not a winning business model. (**AA, take a hint)

So when...

[TemporalBeing]

...are they going to can McBride and get a CEO that will turn around the company, get them out of the mess they are in, and get them back to products? McBride has been bad for Caldera/SCOG since day one.

Question: Could Caldera/SCOG sue McBride for his inept leadership? And causing them to lose market due to his governance, deceptions, etc? He is liable for the company as an executive officer, especially as CEO.

Re:So when...

[thatskinnyguy]

Question: Could Caldera/SCOG sue McBride for his inept leadership? And causing them to lose market due to his governance, deceptions, etc? He is liable for the company as an executive officer, especially as CEO. If by "Caldera/SCOG" you mean "shareholders in Caldera/SCOG", then yes. See Enron for more details.

From the COtGMBC

[thatskinnyguy]

Dear Daryl McBride,

We never much cared for you or your company's shenanigans. In fact, we made an example of what happens to whining patent trolls like you who don't know the law.

Shame on your ass and shame on your lawyers asses for wasting our time and money. Our customers don't buy your products because, quite frankly, you suck. We found a way to use Linux and Unix to get a leg-up on our competition. Our customers just so happened to like our products better. Such is capitalism.

Sincelrely,
The Companies out to get McBride Consortium

P.S. Gates wants to know how the kids are.

Karma

[jointm1k]

The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

Yeah, I remember that one Linux distributor that started to charge random Linux users sixhundred and ninetynine american dollers per CPU that ran the Linux operating system. I mean, no wonder they prefered that over SCO's Unix.

Er. . . wait.

baghdad bob of the year

[heson]

I nominate Darl for this years Baghdad Bob Prize, Im not sure if a Pinocchio doll is a good statyette or if a plain wooden stick symbolizing the nose is enough.

Note to Darl...

[Ang31us]

Darl, YOU who chose to get rid of the Caldera Linux distribution after you were hired in late June 2002. Then, you spit in the face of the community that made your company rich and took on the Nazgul.

You, not your competitors, are the reason why SCO is the joke of the IT industry.

Daryl, that is what we call "Loosing."

[mwilliamson]

What your witnessing is simply the market choosing the superior aggregation of technology, support, and price, and it looks like SCO lost. Daryl, go find another job.

Re:Daryl, that is what we call "Loosing."

[pigs,3different1s]

Fat chance! Who would hire him? Better yet, who would work with him?

Would you like to "Biggie Size" that?

Re:Daryl, that is what we call "Loosing."

[muuh-gnu]

> Daryl, go find another job.

Considering.... how asinine you proved yourself at your last one, please don't.

Stop complaining!

[mce]

Indeed. And what's wrong with that? They filed for chapter 11, so now they naturally have to explain why. Competition that they cannot beat is the reason. The real one. What's wrong with little Darl saying that, other than that it probably is the first accurate business related statement coming out of his mouth in years and that he should have said it a long time ago?

I truely don't understand why you guys are screaming so much about this one. What McBride said is true amd he has to say it: Linux is the thing that ruined their business. It was doing that back in 2003 already. The fact that SCO used the dirty method they did to try to escape from the inevitable, does not change the basic facts. Get over it. You should all be happy, for $YOUR_DEITY_HERE's sake! So stop wasting time on such blahblah and get back to work, making Linux even better. SCO is history.

Re:Stop complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux was NOT ruining their business until McBride came on board, sued IBM, multiple customers, wrote letters to Congress vilifying the GPL as unconstitutional, and wrote threating letters to the customers they weren't already suing. Oh, yeah, and ended up entangled in a lawsuit with Novell which resulted in the UNIX sale contract being clarified as the royalty stream being sold -- not the base copyrights. This interpretation matches a clear reading, and various observers have been suggesting that was the correct interpretation ever since the Asset Purchase Agreement (APA) and amendments thereto were first made public.

Oh, yeah, and Linux was hardly ruining their business. The people now known as SCO were formerly known as Caldera. Those of you paying attention may recall they were an early Linux distributor (their particular initial niche was business desktops, with good Novell integration, a feature more important in the mid-90s than today).

SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) split in two: the UNIX side was sold to Caldera, the client software side formed its own company (Tarantella), which was later purchased by Sun.

Caldera, part the way into the lawsuit, and to add weight to the "we're a UNIX company and Linux stole from us" line of argument, changed its name from Caldera to The SCO Group to muddy the waters.

It's not very insightful to say Linux destroyed a LINUX company that only later questionably purchased some already poorly-negotiated rights, rebranded itself, and attempted to conflate a company of the 80s and 90s with a lawsuit-happy company of the 2000s.

Re:Stop complaining!

[mce]

Linux was NOT ruining their business ...

You need to think longer term and with a larger scope. And then you need to do that not with hindsight, but at the moment of the events under discussion. Caldera as it was had no real future.

PS: Read my sig. I've been around long enough to remember Caldera first hand.

Re:Stop complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO's own incompetence mostly is what is to blame for their demise. If we look at their history, they started as Caldera. They spent many millions of dollars to buy. . . something . . . from The Santa Cruz Operation. At this point they had millions of dollars in the bank still. . . but they'd have many millions more if they hadn't squandered it to buy whatever it was they bought from Santa Cruz. As far as I could tell back then, and it seems even more true today, that was a sucker's deal. Santa Cruz got to get a lot of money for offloading a product that was essentially dieing in the market, and being surpassed by other Unices as well as Linux (let's not forget Solaris, AIX and HP-UX, all Unices that were being updated with new features and capabilities that SCO Unix did not have).

Caldera paid a lot more for SCO Unix than it was worth, by far.

But, then they had to go and make matters worse by spending many more millions of dollars on the lawsuits, which bled it dry of all it's remaining cash, essentially. And the profound mystery is why, when they had no evidence, they set out on these lawsuits to begin with? Obviously, there are a lot of theories, but one way or another, spending millions on lawsuits that you can't win isn't a good way to run a company.

If they had taken the millions they spent on the lawsuits and used them to modernize and advance SCO Unix, they may actually have been a thriving concern today. . . it's hard to say - it's true that, as mentioned before SCO Unix seemed like a lame horse to begin with.

Heck if they hadn't started the lawsuits, maybe they could have just liquidated the company and distributed all the cash-on-hand they had out to their shareholders. That would have been a far more profitable outcome for the shareholders than bankruptcy. Oh wait, that's right, before the lawsuits were announced, the stock was trading at like 2 or 3 dollars a share. During the SCO-owns-you hype, the stock shot up to about $20/share. Guess the original shareholders got paid after all. *cough*

Re:Stop complaining!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not very insightful to say ...

The insightful bit is not what was or was not true in 2003. The insightful bits are: 1) that not everything Darl says is complete gibberish just because he says it (his motives or own prior mistakes don't matter for judging that, only the facts do); and - most of all - 2) that it is a waste of time bickering about whatever irrelevant stuff Darl says, whether correct or not. Darl too is history. Look forward, as the post you replied to suggests we all should!

Re:Stop complaining!

[mce]

Two answers:

• First, I did not say that there was no incompetence, nor that there was no crimial activity (see also my second post in this threat. So what if Darl made mistakes with respect to Linux and failed? That only proves that the Linux phenomenon was stronger. So what if he made his mistakes because he didn't "get it"? That doesn't diminish the fact that Linux did him in. In fact, him "not getting is" is exactly what the open source idea did to him "to do him in". This is survival of the fittest, but in a new kind of world, where those that previously were the fittest no longer are unless they adapt.

• Second, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with Linux being the thing that killed SCO in one way or another. In fact, it is good, because it proves once and for all that Linux has real impact beyond the purely technical geek realm. It's a badge of honour. What SCO's motives and mistakes were is irrelevant, what matters is that the community defeated them.

Re:Stop complaining!

[Kelz]

Unless your deity happens to be Darl. It'd be hard to be happy for his sake about now.

Ice storms in Texas

[Dan667]

When there are ice storms in South Texas (a very rare event), me and a couple of buddies like to get some lawn chairs and a cooler and go sit at the end of an off-ramp of a freeway and watch people freakout while going >5mph and skidding uncontrollably. Everyone knows they are not suppose to be out, but there they are wrecking their cars anyway. To bad there is nothing like that for the SCO board room.

Re:Ice storms in Texas

[ajlitt]

In Austin we do the same thing when it rains.

Re:Ice storms in Texas

[hansamurai]

In northern Minnesota we do the same thing when it's sunny!

Re:Ice storms in Texas

[edraven]

In Soviet Russia... oh, I'm just tired. So very tired.

Re:Ice storms in Texas

[crimperman]

In Britain we get to do it with all three - sometimes in the same day! :o)

Slashdot is a fortune teller

[Karem Lore]

If only McBride had read Slashdot before embarking on this most ridiculous litigation of IBM et al. then he would of realise way back then that this was the case. Yes, Linux is taking market share...There is a very GOOD reason behind this and it is not because SCO Unix is very good!

What do I want ?

[DrStrangeLug]

I would like to see Mr. McBrides head notice stuck on a spike and left out in Wall Street as a warning to the next ten generations of CEO's that some lawsuit gambles come with too high a price.

If only Darl had positioned SCO differently...

[Infonaut]

I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him.

The folks in the music and movie industries have done a pretty good job of making the law work that way.

What Darl does

[Z00L00K]

is complaining about that it's windy instead of starting up the mill and grind some...

They couldn't find an effective business model

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem for a company operating in the Linux environment is finding a way to make money off free software. SCO used to be Caldera. Caldera had one of the first Linux distros. Their business model was to sell the distro. There were a couple of problems: 1 - their distro 'wasn't ready for the desktop' and 2 - you can't make money selling free stuff.

Red Hat was in a similar situation to Caldera and it has become profitable. Its business model is to sell services. That's also IBM's model. It is very profitable.

So, in the face of a non-working business model, Caldera decided to do something else. Remember that there was recent experience suing Microsoft over DOS. Lots of money was made. It seemed logical to sue IBM over Unix. Oopsie, IBM wasn't Microsoft. Now Caldera/SCO had a tiger by the tail and we have all been entertained by a few years worth of brouhaha. The grand finale is upon us (well sometime in the next year anyway) and I'm not sure what we will do for entertainment when it's all over.

Re:They couldn't find an effective business model

[gujo-odori]

Red Hat actually is making money selling Linux, so it can be done, but not with the Linux Caldera was trying to sell, and maybe not in the consumer market they were targeting. That's why Red Hat stopped selling consumer Linux, produced RHEL, and later came out with Fedora for the consumer market. Plus, as you mention, they also sell services for additional revenue.

SCO probably could have made a viable business out of Linux, maybe in combination with their proprietary products or maybe instead of them, if they had invested their time and money in that instead of in filing lawsuits they had to have known were meritless. They might even have been able to merge with Novell, if they'd played their cards right. Much could have been achieved in four years. Of course, Darl and friends were likely not capable of doing that, so SCO might have been doomed anyway, but at least they would have delayed the inevitable for a lot longer and would not have come off looking like both fools and liars in public.

its an all too obvious way to end his career

[dilvish_the_damned]

McBride -- "And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those damned meddling competitors."

Somehow I suspect he will be commenting on the embarrassing failure of Caldera/SCO for years to come.

Re:its an all too obvious way to end his career

[edraven]

Are they gonna pull the rubber mask off of him in court? Because that would be sweet.

18 cents

[BigBadBus]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=1d&l=off&z=m&q=l&c=

Re:18 cents

[BigBadBus]

Yay! 16 cents and falling! We'll reach zero yet...and then, more SCO Pump and Dumps. Jeepers

Ayup

[mark-t]

It quite conceivable that Linux is really to blame for SCO's imminent demise... but then NASA's Apollo program is to blame for being the first to put a man on the moon.

Moglen called it...

[AetherBurner]

"...the creative destruction potential of capitalism...".

SCO, welcome to Business 101. Linux is a better mousetrap in terms of customer perceived value than your product. You can't blame Linux for your misfortunes, only yourself.

Satire Is Dead?

[Jane Q. Public]

Must be... or maybe some modder has no sense of humor.

Typical whine of the loser

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's Micros... er... I mean... Lunix's fault my company is going out of business!!"

Typical whine, just a different target. Yes, we've heard it all before. Your programmers don't stink, your product is not sub-par, and your customers don't hate you. It's all Microso... er, I mean Lunix's fault you can't compete in the marketplace.

The day people stop blaming Microsof... er, I mean Lunix for their lack of quality and coding skill is the day they can actually successfully compete in the same marketplaces as Microso... um, sorry, I mean Lunix.

Gambling as a Business Model

[HexaByte]

Too bad nobody ever told Darl that Gambling isn't a good business model.

He gambled that, by suing for their "stolen code" that was in Linux, he would either get someone to buck up or get IBM, Novel, etc. to buy them up. Maybe he was even hoping Bill Gates would make an offer, so that he could kill Linux.

The only problem was, no one rolled over and played dead, depriving Darl of a buyout and golden parachute, or a "Linux Lottery Lawsuit Goldmine". (TM)

Maybe, Darl, you'd have better luck taking your paycheck out to the local riverboat.....

Re:Gambling as a Business Model

[Trespass]

Gambling is a fantastic business model, provided you're not the one doing the gambling.

What's with the whip-n-buggy analogies?

[Anonymous Coward]

We can be more insensitive than that. Sheesh. This is Slashdot!

How about: It's like the Catholic Church blaming the altar boys for all the $$$ that the Catholic Church has had to shell out and the various bankruptcies that have occurred as a result.

Re:What's with the whip-n-buggy analogies?

[WilliamSChips]

Darl: "This is blasphemy! This is madness!"
/.er: "Madness? THIS! IS! SLASHDOT!!!" *pushes Darl into well*

Missed headline opportunity

[Minwee]

I guess "SCO Blames Sucking for Bankruptcy" would have been too easy.

El Jobso should be CEO over there...

[Kildjean]

If "El Jobso" was CEO over there he would turnthe company around like he did with Apple...

On a more serious note, though ever since Linux jumped into the fray, everyone has had to evolution their products to compete with open source, I hate to say it but even Microsoft has had to evolute into different models in order to be able to compete. Sun, SGI, Red Hat, Slackware and many other distro's have had to create something new in order to attract more users to their efforts. If they would have done that, instead of suing everyone for a desperate catch of money, they would be doing better.

Suck it up Butter Cup...

Ps. I was kidding about "El Jobso" leave him at Apple... :)

what a bunch of baloney

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

Typical SCO FUD. It wasn't Linux itself that led to SCO's downfall, but all those damn Linux pirates who didn't pay their $699 licensing fees and were illegally using Linux for free.

Re:what a bunch of baloney

[bckrispi]

Yeah! Damn cocksmoking teabaggers! :-)

He's not mistaken

[The Angry Mick]

I suspect that Mr. McBride is mistaken

Oh, he's not mistaken; the f*cker's delusional.

He made a poor business decision and it backfired in his face. All this blame slinging is just a lame attempt to preserve some amount of executive "elan" so that he get a job elsewhere - preferably one that doesn't involve french fries.

By sounding CEO-ish, he's trying to polish his own image. Only thing is, he ain't got no soap.

Avoid paying Novell ?

[Laxator2]

The only thing I can imagine is that they will use the Chapter 11 filing to argue that they cannot pay Novell and this will give them time to sling a bit more mud before their bank account hits zero.

SCO is solvent

[darkonc]

SCO is solvent -- unless you include the money that they {claim that they don't,} owe to Novell. . . but even if they end up owing half of the $24M that Novell claims they owe, that would be more than enough to put them into the red.

Thus, . . . even if you accept that competition from Linux has hurt them, what really cooked their goose was suing Novell and, thus, forcing Novell to counter-sue. (Once SCO sued Novell, if Novell hadn't countered with the demand for payment of owed royalties, they might have been permanently barred from suing SCO for that $20M at a later date).

Of course, in their bankruptcy filings, SCO doesn't acknowledge that they owe Novell anything ... presumably under the premise that nothing is owing until the judge declares so in the trial (that is now being held in limbo by the Chapter 11 request). The problem that SCO may have, however, is that -- until, and unless Novell's royalties are declared (or acknowledged) owing, SCO is actually solvent, which means that the bankruptcy court may actually deny their request to go into chapter 11.

On the other hand, admitting that they owe all of this money to SCO would defeat the probable purpose of the filing -- which appears to be keeping Novell off of the list of top creditors. (I'm not going to link to groklaw, here, because their servers are SOOO snowed under by all this sudden attention -- and that just after they upgraded!).

The reason why SCO probably fears Novell being on their list of top creditors is that Novell would then lead a board of creditors which would have an incredibly wide-ranging ability to look into the recent actions of SCO from the inside -- and given how much SCO has been dancing to prevent certain disclosures in court, I expect that they'll be very unhappy to see Novell lawyers walking into the office to pull that very same information out of SCO's files in person.
And then there's the question of how much 'encouragement' Microsoft provided for the lawsuit against Linux in the first place.

Yeppers. I expect that there's gonna be a whole lot of hand-wringing in Utah over the next week or so... possibly even for over the next couple of years.

Re:SCO is solvent

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeppers. I expect that there's gonna be a whole lot of hand-wringing in Utah over the next week or so...

I think you misspelled "shredding".....

Re:SCO is solvent

[div_2n]

Novell is not a creditor. The money SCOX (denies) they owe Novell was never theirs--hence the conversion charge by Novell. If the judge sides with Novell that SCOX is guilty of conversion and awards Novell their money, bankruptcy will not protect them at all because the money wouldn't belong to SCOX. It doesn't help SCOX at all that they don't have all the money Novell alleges they owe. It would be completely game over at that point.

Re:SCO is solvent

[Just Some Guy]

SCO is solvent -- unless you include the money that they {claim that they don't,} owe to Novell.

And I would be Mother Teresa, except I ain't.

Re:SCO is solvent

[Shadowlore]

I'm not going to link to groklaw, here, because their servers are SOOO snowed under by all this sudden attention

So instead of providing us a direct link we can click once, you'll be nice and make us enter their domain name, load the main page, then click the link to the article we need (assuming it's on the front page) and thus at minimum double the number of hits each of us generates on the groklaw servers?

Re:SCO is solvent

[darkonc]

The point of the bankruptcy was to halt to halt the SCO/Novell lawsuit before judge Kimball could pronounce just how much of the SUN/Microsoft royalty deals actually belonged to Novell. In the meantime they claim that the state of that money -- being a Schrodinger's cat problem, means that it all belongs in the hands SCO until the appropriate division is (never) determined. If, however, SCO never makes it out of bankruptcy, Novell can (SCO hopes) be denied both their money and the answers to questions like "who really wanted you to run this kamikaze scam?" which might be in some internal SCO documents.

Damn users, running away when we sue them!

[KWTm]

The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

Furthermore, McBride also noted, "These alternate distributors neglect to sue their customers, a service which we provide for our own customers, and thus they are able to undercut our price of $699 per customer. Despite making a concerted effort to protect our intellectual property through the legal system, IBM has failed to buy us out, so the expected funds did not materialize which had been earmarked for expansion plans for my summer cottage --I mean, er, corporate conference facilities.

"We expect our recovery to be delayed somewhat while we initiate the appeals procedure. At that point, we anticipate a healthy rebound, as our business partner tells one of those investment firms to give us more money.

"Even though shares of our stock cost less than an order of French fries at McDonald's, we want to allay any concerns about being delisted for having a low price. Our accountants have said ... er, I mean ... our accountant has said that we can simply do a stock merge, to have fewer shares, each of which cost more. As the price drops further and we merge more shares, we anticipate that it will be at least one week before all the shares are merged into a single share that costs $1.30. By that time, we should have identified another customer whom we can sue. It should not take too long to identify since we don't have a very long list to look through."

Re:Damn users, running away when we sue them!

[SirMeliot]

By that time, we should have identified another customer whom we can sue.

You might have something there. On their website it says this:

SCO intends to maintain business as usual throughout the Chapter 11 proceedings.

Re:Damn users, running away when we sue them!

[christurkel]

"While we are aware our core product, UnixWare, hasn't been updated since oh, 2002, runs X11R5 and CDE and comes with a GNU toolchain that was current in 1999 and we charge $699 per CPU for it, we maintain its all the fault of Linux. Now get off my lawn you miserable FOSS hackers!"

if only Biff Tannen was on the board...

[quaketripp]

Hello!? Anyone home? Think McBride, Think!

turds

[Erris]

The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.

Pioneers often look bad in hind sight, but OpenLinux was a better place to be than Windows 95 or 98. Had they continued on they could have the markets now owned by Crossover Office and would be at least as polished as Xandros.

If you want to see poor, look at SCO Unix itself.

Re:turds

[DrgnDancer]

Yeah, SCO was terrible. If you look through old Samba TNG mailing lists you can actually find where I tried to get help compiling on SCO back in 2000 and Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, the lead developer, replied:

"i tried compiling on sco, too, and libtool went "urgh, sco!""

I think that sums everything up.

Exactly. This is Slashdot.

[penp]

Where every analogy must relate to cars.

I'll buy the code off you for a dollar

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll fix it up and sell it as the cadillac of 'nix's. (does d3d too, thanks to the first of many licensing agreement with M$).

Fine then

[nuzak]

Maybe you're dead because you sued your own partners and customers. Who cares? In your fantasy world, you're dead because you couldn't compete. Fine.

Just stay dead. The world doesn't even owe you a eulogy.

Leave Darl Alone!

[flyingfsck]

Sniff... Darl only sued IBM and Novel and afew others. You guys are just jealous of him and his superior UNIX business! Sniff... Leave him alone! A few years ago he had a flourishing little software company and then you guys ruined him! Waah! Sniff... Leave him alone, or you'll have to deal with ME!!!

With apologies to the weird Yootoob Guy...

All together now!

[sizzzzlerz]

Ooooooohhhh, poor baby.

Re:All together now!

[Dunbal]

Someone needs to make a video like this.

Now please, leave Darl alone!

F SCO

[n3v]

Cry me a river.

It's not going to work for SCO

[Animats]

Novell already sent five heavy-hitters from Morrison and Foerster, the leading bankruptcy law firm, to Delaware to present their side of the SCO bankruptcy. SCO originally wanted to keep paying their lawyers for their various pre-existing lawsuits during bankruptcy. But they didn't even try to convince the bankruptcy judge of that in court today. So that legal money drain stops. Novell indicated they're going to file a motion to restart their lawsuit (it's just stayed temporarily after the bankruptcy filing), and on October 5, Novell gets to argue that their financial claim preempts most of the other creditors. SCO was just supposed to pass royalties through to Novell, not keep them. Judge Kimball agreed, and put that in his summary judgment order last month, so Novell will probably win that one.

Meanwhile, SCO stock is now at $0.18, down 99% from the peak after SCO sued IBM.

Yeah, WABI would have saved them

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Caldera/SCO's biggest mistake evar was not picking up Sun's old dead WABI and running with that football.

Your loosing?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it that you can spell "aggregation" correctly but not "losing" or "you're"?

Re:Your loosing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say pure luck.

I'm still pissed about beer!

[simpl3x]

And, don't even get me on the subject of cigarettes! WTF, I'll never be able to live a clean life with all of these sinful things around. Well, off to the airport restroom...

So long "Netcraft", it was a good run

[snowwrestler]

But there's a new sheriff in town.

Darl confirms it--Unix is dying.

WAAAAAAAHHH!!!

[certain death]

My pussy hurts!!! I hope he gets a job with a cable company, I will never use their service either!

Quit your bitching

[r_benchley]

McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

OS X is UNIX http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/technology/unix.html and you don't hear Apple whining about Linux taking away their market share. You learn to adapt in the marketplace or you go out of business. OS X is a great OS that performs ably in the desktop, workstation or server environments, but rather than bet the farm on OS X, Apple diversified their offerings and have the iPod, iPhone, iTV and iTunes to strengthen their bottom line. SCO felt entitled and thought that the day would never come when people would switch to Linux from their product. They took no steps to compete with Red Hat, Novell and Sun and now they're paying the price for it. Screw SCO.

Re:Quit your bitching

[MightyMartian]

It's a very different situation. Apple runs OSX on a *nix-like platform, yes, and there *nix tools there, but it certainly isn't being marketed in the same way that SCO Unix, AIX or Solaris is. They are marketed as server class Unix or Unix-like operating systems, while OSX is a desktop operating system very much in competition with Microsoft's consumer offerings. Different kettle of fish.

almost every post here is playing in his hand

[superwiz]

He did, in fact, claim that SCO's downfall was due to the natural market forces and the company's inability to compete with other Unix vendors. His claim, actually, doesn't seem to make too much of a boogy man of the competition... he didn't say they sold child porn... he just said they were provding alternative which the market place prefered.

The reason he is being this (almost) honest is that he now needs to downplay the fact that SCO completely lost their ability to gain new business because of the lawsuits. Without even mentioning whether the lawsuit has merit, the rule of the market place is if you can compete you compete, if you can't compete you go away or sue (see Sun Tzu's "...if the enemy is weaker than you fight him; if he is equally matched, irritate him; if he is stronger evade him..."). Suing, of course, is meant to be the irritating distraction.

So the market place came to see the company as admitting defeat because of the lawsuits. This is what he trying to divert attention from. And everyone here seems to be playing his hand.

Market Cap: 3.26M

[jinxidoru]

Has anyone else taken a peak at their market cap? It's 3.26M. By the time you read this, it's probably lower. That is so ridiculously cheap! Hell, not much longer and I could buy their company. I have been thinking about moving a few miles north to Orem, maybe I could convert their offices into a residence.

Re:Market Cap: 3.26M

[timeOday]

I wonder what is the legal tab for this whole escapade? It could easily exceed $3M.

Re:Market Cap: 3.26M

[innocent_white_lamb]

Their debts come with their assets if you purchase them, and their office space is rented from someone else.
 
It's not much of a bargain at any price.

right to make a profit

[gizmo_mathboy]

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. Robert Heinlein, _Life Line_ (1939)

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

"SCO's bankruptcy petition"

-------->>>>> Who's next!!? -------------

They still have...what?

[Ngarrang]

In a statement issued Friday, SCO said its board of directors "unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders and employees."

Wait...so, there are people who actually still work for SCO? And people who still own their stock? Riiiiigh. And the next thing they are going to tell me is that the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are real.

Perhaps if they actually tried to sell something?

[hurfy]

We actually run a copy of one of the SCO Unix versions. Bought thru a 3rd party supplier of our entire system. In 3 years now neither has ever mentioned the product again....

It is good from our end to have a product that simply works(albeit in a simple app) and you are never bothered by the supplier again for updates or to buy more. On the other hand the supplier should probably sell something every now and then...

What Ransom Love misunderstood.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously Love missed what drives open source.

Money is good. Source is better.

"We dumped $100 million into Linux."

How many lines of code is that?

Re:What Ransom Love misunderstood.

[Pseudonym]

Money is good. Source is better.

Source does you no good if nobody "out there" is using the software. That's where money comes in.

To make great software, you only need source. If you want leverage (e.g. for everyone to support open standards), you need brainshare and money. And money buys brainshare.

good!

[m2943]

One down, three more to go.

Failure to adapt.

[jellomizer]

Linux was a competitor But SCO failed to Adapt in time to face the competition they just tried to kill it. This is often the effect when someone first sees a threat they try to get rid of it. Linux by its very nature is much harder to get rid of then other competitors because it wasn't centralized. Attacking Linux is also attacking potential future customers. If SCO did nothing they may still be alive today like Sun and HP. They could have made tons of money from Linux Fallout. Those companies that tried Linux and realized it didn't fit their company (Yes they do exist Linux is not the perfect do all for everything OS). They could have competed more with Sun and HP for business. A Fully Commercially Supported Unix that Runs on your platform. And is not treated like the ugly step child like Solaris X86. There wireless technology they just started getting involved into. They had potential but it wasn't Linux that killed SCO. Is was SCO that killed SCO they abused future customers, they sued potential allies, welcomed other competitors, Lied to the public, wasted Taxpayer money, picked on the biggest strongest company it could find. In short they did everything wrong, a perfect example on what not to do.

Re:Failure to adapt.

[Jaxoreth]

They could have made tons of money from Linux Fallout.

If anybody could have made money from Linux Fallout, it would be Interplay.

more like "don't buy (stuff) from assholes."

[swschrad]

SCO unix is supposedly pretty solid.

the company's legal and pathological direction is purely out of a bad acid trip.

that, for me, would keep me from sending them RFQs or seeing their reps.

Another point they missed

[Weaselmancer]

SCO (originally, anyways) was in the business of selling UNIX systems - which is a niche market. And that niche is pretty well defined. People like us /.ers fill that niche. Ideally, we're the people The Suits ask whenever they say "we need a solution to this problem."

By attacking Linux, they offended pretty much their entire target market. Nobody here would recommend SCO for anything, and last I checked our user ID numbers were over a million.

That is some seriously monstrous bad PR to try to get over.

Of course, all this assumes that Darl actually wanted to run a software company in the first place. Maybe he doesn't care about SCO at all, and just makes these noises in the press because that's his job. It's equally likely that he's a paid assassin out to tarnish the reputation of open source, or even better yet put an end to open source in the business sector. See the Halloween X document for clarification. Link 1. Link 2.

Re:Another point they missed

[mwvdlee]

Not buying from SCO has nothing to do with technical issues or dislike of the company.
It's basically a legal liability to buy from SCO; they've shown to sue their own customers if you ever switch to another product.
You'd be buying yourself into the worst kind of vendor lock-in you possibly can.
Plain and simple, no legal department should allow such risks in their company.

Re:Another point they missed

[mr_mischief]

Interestingly enough, Darl McBride and Co. have killed one of the top ten closed-source Unix vendors, strengthened the Linux market, and helped bring about major improvements in how Open Source people document their code contributions. If his goal was destroying Open Source in favor of Closed Source, he achieved pretty much the opposite.

Sun, IBM, HP, and Apple (who all sell Unix on Intel-powered hardware (although HP's Intel hardware of choice is Itanium)) are likely not at all upset that SCO is no longer going to be trying to bill themselves as the premier Intel-compatible Unix. All of these companies of course also sell or have sold Unix on other hardware (Sparc, Power, PA-RISC, Alpha, PowerPC, Motorola 68k to name a few). Sun and IBM are two fairly strong supporters of Linux, too, although they both tout their proprietary Unix platforms as well. HP has business relationships and/or offers support for Red Hat, Oracle, Novell's Suse, Red Flag, Mandriva, and Debian.

SGI used to have IRIX, but they are phasing it out in favor of Linux (but Windows still survives on some SGI lines). SGI, being the class act it is, offers support for existing IRIX customers until at least 2013 (or the company's long-rumored folding, whichever comes first -- they actually came back from Chapter 11). RHEL and SLES are both available, supported options on Altix. SLES seems to be preferred.

It appears most of the closed-source Unix companies know the value Linux can offer. If they're not moving from closed-source solutions to Linux, then they're making it clear that Linux is an option. It's interesting that many of the companies willing to go in big for Linux sell something besides operating systems. Hardware, databases, visualization software, and directory software seem like good compliments to an OS, and vendors selling those items are just who is embracing Linux. Even Apple, who hasn't done much to embrace Linux, isn't adversarial to it. Parallels (third-party, of course) and Boot Camp (Apple) both can give access to any of the x86 or x86-64 Linux distros on the newer Macs, while PowerPC Macs dual-boot with Linux just fine.

Who runs this stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

All these years, whats seems a hundred articles and a hundred thousands of messages in this and other forums, and I havent heard from one person actually running SCO operating systems, and what thier plans are. Or from a SCO employee. Thats odd. I remember seeing SCO boxes at GM dealerships, but I havent seen them anywhere else. I suppose they run non mission critical stuff, on i386, easily moved to linux? Anyone out there actually admin Openserver or UNIXware boxes? Just curious.

Re:Who runs this stuff

[imadoofus]

Yes. I do.

wrong title

[qcomp]

that should read:
World credits Linux with SCO's demise
scnr

Yep. Hardware, not unix.

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically Sun and IBM (and formerly HP, DEC and SGI) sold big fast RISC-processor hardware that was what the enterprise needed for big heavy-duty database operations. Unix was the necessary O/S for such hardware because that's what the top database vendors (Oracle, Informix and Sybase) developed for back then.

Eventually it all boiled down to who could establish the 64-bit platforms with massive I/O thruput (Sun and IBM) and the rest died out from hostile takeover or outright extinction (DEC, and then SGI, and now finally the HP-PA-RISC is dead). HP-UX on Itanium is also late for it's own funeral. There's only two players left: Sun and IBM, and things aren't looking so good for Sun after 2007. I predict that IBM will be the last remaining "big iron" Unix H/W vendor left by 2010. The viable market then will consist of only IBM on the top-end big heavy proprietary Unix and everybody else will be Linux running on commodity-type hardware. And your realistic database choices on such a platform will be down to only Oracle and open source too. Nobody is interested anymore in IBM's DB2 or Informix, and Sybase is also a dead player too.

Your other platform in the marketplace will of course be Microsoft Windows-based systems.

America's Legal System at Work

[BanjoBob]

Lets see how this goes...
SCO files a bogus law suit with no evidence.
Then also refuses to show any evidence after three court orders.
They lie to the courts repeatedly without a challenge.
They file conflicting reports with the SEC and the courts.
They cause multiple defendents to spend millions of dollars on bugus claims.
Drag out the suits for years causing significant financial loss to the innocent.
Keep money that doesn't belong to them and use it against the rightful owner.
File bankruptcy to avoid paying anybody for damage done.
Collect $2-Million and a Get out of Jail Free card
Continue to operate as before.
No punishment for those who started this fraud.

Yes, that pretty much sums up our legal system. America! What a Country!

Linus had to sue to get Linux copyrights

[Anonymous Coward]

Google for it.

What DARL stands for

[castle]

Dumb As Rocks + Litigious.

To kick a man like this while he's down fills me with glee.

Re:Magnificent Business Model

[TaoPhoenix]

Bingo. This is the post I want to remember.

Let's assume that this operation is a "subsidiary" of Microsoft.

After all, all it takes is a meeting between Ballmer & McBride, right?

So: They can spin Microsoft's monopoly position as Linux's fault? That's like 4 birds with one ricocheting stone.

Capitalism

[KiwiCanuck]

So the problem is capitalism then? His competitors swooped in and stole his clients. If you don't like it move to a communist country.

I hope the court reject SCO's Chapter 11...

[denobug]

SCO will still have bankrupcy protection. Chapter 7 will close the business for good.

He didn't want to make a profit

[tkrotchko]

He wanted to make a zillion bucks. Anybody can make a few million a year with a software company. But to get 100's of millions, you've got to get somebody to buy you out.

Re:He didn't want to make a profit

[fishbowl]

>He wanted to make a zillion bucks.

He could have -- there was a time when some big player could have realized that a consumer Unix could actually get double digit percents of the consumer OS market. It took Linux getting there on its own before anybody understood this. But during that time Microsoft further developed the Windows hegemony, and the Unix vendors remained in their niches for the most part.

Caldera Linux

[nurb432]

Hmm, Redhat makes money off linux, and i think Caldera did in the old days ( they made a buck off me at least ). Im pretty sure Novell makes some $ off SUSE too.

So its not that the availably free unix did it to them, it that they couldn't adapt. ( sound familiar AA's? ) . Besides, unix has been free for a long time ( BSD ) and VAR's still had value and made a nice income.

This has got me wondering...

[HexaByte]

McBride's antics over the last few years has got me wondering, is he Larry's brother Daryl or his other brother Daryl?

Did he think he could fool us simply by dropping the y in his name?

Do you think Larry and the other Daryl will give him old job back cleaning out septic tanks? After all, it's obvious he was indispensable to them, his antics have proven that the only way he could be so full of crap is by actually sucking the septic tanks out by himself!

Re:DirectX

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware agnostic?

More from McBride...

[MS-06FZ]

When questioned further about his expectations about the computer business, McBride had this to say:

"See, when I first got started in this business, it was easy. Sell software, make money. It was a lot of fun! I wondered why everyone didn't do that. But nobody ever told me that when I go out there, to make money, there would also be other people out there, and that the money they'd be trying to make was the same money. It's not fair, this business is mine, I totally called it! But other people are still getting in the same business anyway. I hate them. I hope they die."

Slump? Scox was *never* successfull

[walterbyrd]

Scox was formed to sell Linux, now they blame Linux competition for their downfall.

The only time scox had a profitable quarter was when msft gave scox money to sue ibm. And, since that money was offically for a "scosource" license, that money might belong to novell.

Scox has been gushing red ink since the day they opened. Scox opened during that dot-com era and raised a bunch of money for their IPO. Since then, it's all been downhill.

+1000 insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Mod this guy up.

Re:+1000 insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll get right on that.... as soon as we figure out what in the world a "Lunix" is.

so it was suicide

[wardk]

all this time Darl and friends have been saying

SCO=UNIX
SCO=LINUX
SCO=$$$

when really it was

SCO=RIP

Re:DirectX

[fbjon]

Hardware agnostic? Anything is more hardware-agnostic than DOS.

I blame SCO

[Megane]

...for not aggressively trying to gain market share back to Unix. Nobody was buying SCO's product because, compared to Linux, it sucked. Instead, they were wasting their time and money with a stupid lawsuit.

Bad name change decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Be forewarned. This is just my opinion of what killed SCO. It's one that may or may not be shared by others.

SCO OpenServer had a pretty large following and for a solid (albeit slow to change) system, OpenServer was a very good choice. When Caldera purchased SCO, they made the mistake of changing the name of the company (was it Caldera Unix?). It only lasted a month or two until they figured out that they had made a mistake and they changed the name back to something close to SCO. It was too little, too late. Quite a few of the SCO regulars got to thinking that if OpenServer was going to change drastically that they would be better off looking at Linux. Once they started loosing the die hard SCO customers (which if properly managed could have kept Caldera in business for a very long time), they needed a new business model. The only one that they had was to start suing over IP. It surprises me that they were able to keep that model alive as long as they have. I've been waiting for them to fold since the name change.

Surprisingly, the new SCO has made some nice updates/changes to the OpenServer product. It's too bad that the name change blunder seems to have taken them down the wrong path. I think that they may have been able to really do something with the product. There is a gap between the slow changing SCO of the past and the rapid fire Linux changes that could have been filled nicely.

RTFA

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

TFA doesn't talk about "blaming" at all. All of the "blame" talk is in the Slashdot headline. This is an article about a bankruptcy court filing, citing documents where the company is required to provide a serious analysis of the reason it needs bankruptcy protection.

They were never that big of a company.

[emjoi_gently]

A little group with a 30 million or so turnover a year in the best of times.
Not exactly in the same league as MS, Sun, IBM, HP.

Trying to develop a UNIX to compete with companies with vastly more resources was always a losing game.

I believe you mean trademarks

[Kelson]

Remember, trademark != copyright.

Cry Me a River!

[nukemall]

SCO made a play for easy money without competition and lost. No one to blame but themselves. They were greedy and tried to make an easy buck at the gambling casino and lost every buck they had save it be salvage costs for a sorry excuse for a company. They tried to leach off the hard earned income from other companies that made it honestly. Micr$haft would have loved to see them win, that's why they silently supported their cause with a buck under the table.

Let them rot in the subearthian inferno.

Eat bat guano and die SCO..

SCO Is Still Dead

[frankenheinz]

Continued beating of the dead horse that is SCO reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live bit about Francisco Franco. I move that all future SCO articles bear the same title: "SCO Is Still Ded".

Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO purchased Caldera several years ago (a Linux company), so they are now crying?
SCO sued lot of people and companies to fight Linux, now they cry?

SCO failed because SCO and the people who worked for it are crap (garbage, basura, merda).

Darl, for a change, you're right...

[WheelDweller]

Linux, unlike the SCO you sell today has come a tremendous way since 1989 when I first used SCO for my work. In fact, you had several year's lead on Linux, with a solid product, and a complicated X server (and just about everything else overcomplicated) but it ran solid...on certain motherboards.

Today, Linux has gone from an idea to an open-source monster. People developed on -it- because they loved the chance to claim part of it as their own- to develop without paying $1,100 plus the cost of the OS (until recently) to get the development system. (See my ~1996 email to that effect...) and so they developed, blossomed, and grew, while the change of management at SCO put the thing into solid ice. You stayed with 8-bit displays, cheasy graphics that "weren't worth your investment" and "didn't have a business need" and the Linux guys did it, anyway.

Remember "Steven"? Remember "Simpsons"? They were attempts for open-source people to inject some brevity into your product, even if you didn't condone it, you could have allowed it to happen. Remember u386mon? This would tell you how close you were to shutting down the entire operation and rebuilding the tables in the middle of the day...you didn't write it. And you wouldn't pay for the programmers who would change the way those tables would grow and manage themselves. But your customers did; I was the man on the spot when it shut down out of the blue, because some stupid table had overflowed.

You walked away from the product; you followed your 'business sense' that had nothing to do with software, grass-roots development, or any of the new things in business. And I even told you so in 1996. Who's laughing now?

No, not me- I'm busy fiddling with my 1-wire connected sensors, figuring out the best timing for better ventilation. Meanwhile I'm listening to David Benoit playing something sweet from an Ogg Vorbis file NFSed from a central server. (All Linux) And I just might play some more UT/Civilization or watch a movie later, all of which I couldn't DO on SCO, thanks to your strict adherence to 'widget centered' business school tactics that have no place in software.

I'm sorry your life sucks; you started with a powerhouse product but you wouldn't let it grow- always looking for the inside lock on profits. Your Unix/Xenix was a nice place to learn about Unix; I'm sorry it spent 25 years or so locked in amber and didn't grow up. But on the flip side, you should feel right at home on Linux. Your customers will, too, now that they can get X, productivity and all sorts of new powers from being a modern Unix.

Buy a shirt factory, sell aluminum can stock, be a stock broker...just don't come back to the OS market, you haven't the knack for it.

Not Linux

[Shadowlore]

It wasn't Linux that ended SCO, it was inability to provide a service and/or product to customers willing to pay what they (SCO) wanted to get. It's that simple.

To say it was Linux is to say that Linux is a sure moneymaker. It isn't. Indeed, what Linux and FOSS does is to raise the bar on making large amounts of money, whilst lowering the bar for making more modst amounts. In this regad it is very similar to the Internet. Despite our perpetual jokes of
1. Put up website
2. ???
3. Profit!!

And similar, the reality is that it takes work of some kind. You have to provide something people want at prices people are willing to pay to keep you afloat. The Internet does not eliminate step two, and neither does Linux. SCO did not have a monopoly, and neither does Linux. As a result it takes effort to make money in that industry.

Linux is a major salvo in the move to service over product. SCO became convinced that they were entitled to OPM from something they bought. They got there by failing to be competitive. There was no technical reason why SCO could not have "gone Linux" and thus been a part of that market instead of wanting to drain that market to their coffers by strongarm tactics.

But they did not take the route that *could* have made them money, but involved real effort.

That, and only that, is the real reason SCO went belly up. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. That is the important lesson here, so damned right we should be making that point known!

Re:Not Linux

[mce]

To say it was Linux is to say that Linux is a sure moneymaker.

No. It only says that competing against Linux is harder than Darl thought it to be. You can't just go about blabbering nonsense and succesfully ask money for whatever you do, because: 1) some of Linux really is for free as in beer; 2) there is no room for making serious sure money off Linux unless you adhere to its principles and spirit. Room for doing the latter combo is limited, precisely because on its own Linux is not a sure moneymaker and some established companies (Novell (i.e. Suse), Redhat, IBM) have taken a considerable portion of that market already.

Re:Not Linux

[fadzlan]

Amen brother.

It was not Linux. It was their own incompetence.

They can't blame everyone for making progress when they are not making any.

Ah that was the problem competing companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello McFly, sorry McBride, it's called business. The better product/company usually excels in a market.

Suicididal blame?

[shanen]

I've heard of blaming the victim, but this is just friggin' ridiculous. SCO was expecting to be loved for trying to destroy Linux after thousands of people donated their time and energies to making it work?

In today's good news, SCOX is *STILL* being traded, and lost more than 25% of it's residual value yesterday. A few more days of compound lossage, and we'll need to price them using those special numbers... I am rusty today. I can't recall the proper name for numbers that approach zero without ever getting there. Anyway, today's market cap is under $4 million. IBM couldn't afford to buy them out at the current price. They'd have to file it under "paper clips" or something.

To you moderators: Go ahead and moderate this post with your typical imbecility. Because of your incompetence and poor taste I only visit /. every few months anyway, basically only for a special occasion like SCO's demise. I used to be a regular before you flatulent moderators ran off the actually funny participants. The current level of "+5 humor" on /. is truly dreggish.

Re:Suicididal blame?

[shanen]

c/"+5 humor"/"+5 funny"/

No, that wasn't supposed to be a recursive joke or meta-joke. But on /. proofreading is so passe.

Re:Suicididal blame?

[oojah]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote ?

Re:Suicididal blame?

[shanen]

No, that's the name of the kind of graph. I think "infinitesimals" is probably the term I was fishing for. However the price of SCOX isn't yet a perfectly decreasing function. It actually surged up by 25% yesterday--to 20 cents per share.

I'm Melting! Melting!

[knuth]

Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?

McBride is a piece of work. So rather than improve his company's offerings, he sues competitors and customers alike, and then is surprised when they won't be victimized.

Hooray!

[Moe1975]

Ok, this is what I had been waiting for . . .

HHOOOORRRRRAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

That was the last nail in their coffin. Now someone needs to shut the lid (when their stock is delisted) and bury it . . .

This makes me oh so happy.

Victory!

SGI

[falconwolf]

This is as stupid as horse drawn buggy makers blaming automobile makers for going out of business. SGI didnt adjust.

Actually SGI did adjust. Instead of making PCs, which I thought were pretty good, they now concentrate on high performance or supercomputers. Naval Surface Warfare Center Selects SGI Altix for Modeling of Warhead Impact.

Falcon

SGI didnt adjust.

[falconwolf]

Sure they did - they're called Nvidia now.

No, SGI now concentrates on high performance or super computers. Altera and XtremeData Show Industry's Highest Performance Front Side Bus Module for Intel Xeon Processor-Based Platforms

Falcon

SCO owes Novell

[falconwolf]

Of course, in their bankruptcy filings, SCO doesn't acknowledge that they owe Novell anything ... presumably under the premise that nothing is owing until the judge declares so

The judge has already ruled SCO owes Novell, all that needs to be determined is how much. "SCO's potential death blow came in a ruling last month, as Judge Dale Kimball of Utah's U.S. District Court ruled that Novell still owned the Unix and UnixWare copyrights that formed the basis of SCO's grievance. Kimball's order is likely to cripple SCO's flagship Linux case, the extensive complaint against IBM it filed in 2003."

Falcon

It was HIS choice...

[freeze128]

He didn't HAVE to sue every one of his customers while Microsoft made deals with system builders to have Windows installed on every new PC sold....

He could have made a deal with Apple. Can you imagine Unixware on the iPhone?

SCO bankruptcy

[Moniker42]

"The technology is changing! What's with all this new crap putting us out of business?"

I think a failure to recognise the changeable nature of Information Technology and that they need to stay on top of the latest trends (such as Linux) rather than bemoan people's lack of loyalty to Unix, is the cause of the SCO Group's bankruptcy filing. It's a constantly changing environment, and companies need to innovate and improvise.

Re:DirectX

[ultranova]

Anything is more hardware-agnostic than DOS.

DOS runs on more hardware than Windows Vista. Therefore, your statement is wrong.

Re:Perhaps if they actually tried to sell somethin

[mok000]

I've read many times that SCO Unix is a very stable product, albeit -- with the poor management -- has fallen behind with respect to hardware support. I'm sure SCO Unix would have had a niche of users and applications, and the company could have done well by working with the community and offering a Linux distribution to other customers.

I feel bad for the SCO developers and employees who've most likely tried to do their jobs, while their management have spent all their time running the business into the ground.

Most likely, Novell will regain the ownership of Unix. Then it remains to be seen what will happen.

Re:DirectX

[fbjon]

DOS runs on more hardware than Windows Vista. Therefore, your statement is wrong. That's not the point. DOS as a development platform is very much not hardware agnostic.

His career may not be over - just changing

[crimperman]

Somehow I suspect he will be commenting on the embarrassing failure of Caldera/SCO for years to come.

I suspect he will move into the after-dinner speaking market and write too many books on how he spectacularly failed and "what he learned". He will probably make some fairly decent cash from this as other "business" folk will listen/read because they want to a) gloat, b) pretend they are in reality trying to "learn from his mistakes" and c) gloat a little more.

All the while the model for the "business" he was (and they are) in is changing and what caused him and will cause others to fail is their refusal to adapt.

For McBride to call the Linux companies aggressive after the stunts he has pulled is hypocrisy in its purest form. Aside from that I thought the whole point of free market enterprise was this survival of the fittest thing. Don't we keep getting told that to succeed/survive in business you have to be ruthless and aggressive? (Not that I agree with this it's just what people like McBride seem to keep spouting).

You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

Rather blame SCO's love for Microsoft's money

[barwasp]

SCO choose to ask Microsoft's money for attacking Linux in court. That path was the irreversible mistake...

• MS gave SCO money ->keeping the money and not attacking Linus -> Bill angry -> Chapter 11
• Attacking Linux in court ->company reputation ruined -> sales down -> chapter 11
• Attacking Linux in court ->big players angry (IBM, Novell& Co.)-> legal costs & rulings -> chapter 11

Even, winning in court and starting to get money from every corporate Linux install would have ruined SCO's own UNIX business. Linux hackers would probably have taken revenge on SCO's existing UNIX customers and none of the railroad companies, cities or universities would have dared to bind themselves to SCO's products.

Had SCO used its time and resources for developing new markets and products; e.g. as Sun did with Java. SCO could have had a future, now there is nothing else to blame than the own poor choice of strategy.

Competition in the computing industry?

[johnsie]

There's competition in the computing industry? OMG!!! WTF???? If you cant stand the heat, dont stand near the fire. Linux dont have 95% of the market share so if you're going to blame anyone then blame microsoft.

Sounds familiar...

[Anonymous Coward]

"And I'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn kids!"

Lets hope it goes to Chapter 7 (nt)

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets hope it goes to Chapter 7 (nt)

Linux is to blame for SCO's troubles?

[slacknhash]

... must not say 'They should sue!' ... must not say 'They should sue!' It's not big, it's not clever and it's not funny.

SCO's lost sales because of Linux? They should sue!

(headdesk) I'm sorry. I'm so very, very sorry. The mind was willing but the flesh was weak.

SCO and Microsoft

[neonsignal]

Dammit, we bankrupted the wrong one...