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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.""
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.
...everyone but himself. What an ego.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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")
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.
Read radical news here
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.
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.
Cause -> Effect.
~Sticky
/Just a thought, just a thought.
I wish someone could explain that to the RIAA.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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??
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://www.mhall119.com
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.
Linux user since early January 1992.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.....
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
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.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.
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.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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'.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.