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

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.

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: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.