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Final Judgment — SCO Loses, Owes $3,506,526
Xenographic writes "SCO has finally lost to Novell, now that Judge Kimball has entered final judgment against SCO. Of course, this is SCO we're talking about. There's still the litigation in bankruptcy court, which allowed this case to resume so that they could figure out just how much SCO owes, which is $3,506,526, if I calculated the interest properly, $625,486.90 of which will go into a constructive trust. And then there's the possibility that SCO could seek to have the judgment overturned in the appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court when that fails. Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more. Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
This ain't it.
Novell is done (modulo appeals and the arbitration -- see below).
Still pending
* Bankruptcy
* SuSE UnitedLinux arbitration (stayed pending resolution of BK)
* IBM's counterclaims (stayed pending resolution of BK)
* RedHat (stayed pending IBM)
* AutoZone (technically still alive, don't believe anyone's ever going to finish it. Stayed pending IBM, I believe).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Many times when companies die (for legal reasons) the Management just creates a new company.
You mean like when SCO setup a company in the far-east and tried to transfer their assets to it?
Or like when SCO proposed splitting its company in two, with one part taking all the assets, and the other part taking the legal claims?
This is close to being it...they're guilty of conversion. That transforms them into a priority creditor with a 3.5 million dollar claim to things before anything else.
I doubt SCOX could mount an appeal effort. If they could, it's going to have to be something where they had some tidbit of the law overlooked where they didn't get a fair trial, because there's nothing else for them to actually appeal otherwise.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
In 2002, SCO had a new CEO, Darl McBride. SCO wasn't doing so well; their primary product was a version of Unix that ran on Intel machines, but they were competing with Linux for that same market. And Linux is free, and the new hotness in Unix-style operating systems.
Somehow Darl learned that SCO owned Unix, i.e. the copyrights to the source. And he was led to believe that the code in Unix had leaked into Linux. So he came up with a new money making plan:
This wouldn't work very well for most customers, since SCO's market was mostly small businesses.
But there was a big fish he could go after: IBM. You see, IBM was a licensee of the AT&T Unix that SCO owned. IBM derived its own versions of Unix from it. And as part of that, IBM enhanced its own Unix with new technologies. And IBM also contributed those same new technologies, which IBM had developed on its own, to Linux.
So Darl's theory was that SCO not only owned the rights to its own Unix, and to the AT&T Unix that it had acquired, but also to every version of Unix that was derived from them by a licensee. So, he could sue IBM for leaking SCO's property to Linux, and he could sue any company that used Linux (unless they paid SCO an extortion fee not to).
The SCO Group sued IBM for $1 billion dollars!
(A common theory is that SCO expected IBM to just buy SCO to make the problem go away, thus enabling Darl and the other SCO executives to cash in their SCOX shares at a profit.)
We'll skip all the counter lawsuits, ridiculous claims by SCO, Microsoft's part in it, the suits by SCO against other customers, and get to the best part:
Remember that it all started because the SCO Group's predecessor (The Santa Cruz Operation) had purchased the AT&T Unix copyrights from Novell. Well it turns out that they didn't. What they purchased was the right to market and license it. And to collect licensing fees, for which they had to pay Novell a portion. They did not actually own the copyrights or any substantial amount of intellectual property.
So Novell sued SCO, claiming that a) SCO didn't own anything, and b) SCO owed Novell money, because the SCO Group hadn't been paying Novell their share of the licensing fees.
Novell won, and SCO went bankrupt.