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SCO Proposes Sale of Assets To Continue Litigation
gzipped_tar sends in this excerpt from the Salt Lake Tribune:
"The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products and use proceeds to continue its controversial lawsuits over the alleged violations of its copyrights in Linux open-source software. The Lindon company has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal court in Delaware where it sought bankruptcy protection from creditors after an adverse ruling in the Linux litigation. If approved by a bankruptcy judge, the plan could mean SCO's server software and mobile products lines are owned by other parties while SCO itself remained largely to pursue the lawsuits under the leadership of CEO Darl McBride. 'One goal of this approach is to separate the legal defence of its intellectual property from its core product business,' McBride said in a letter to customers, partners and shareholders. Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company's efforts to market its products. 'We believe there's value in these assets and in order for the business to move forward it's imperative we separate it from our legal claims and we allow our products business to move forward,' he said Friday."
So Darl is going to basically sell off most of what the company has to continue a lawsuit he has no hope of winning? What the HELL is wrong with this guy? Worst. CEO. EVAR.
'One goal of this approach is to separate the legal defence of its intellectual property from its core product business'
Then why not drop the case and focus more fully on your 'core product business'
davecb5620@gmail.com
They want to pay Novell in worthless stock.
And the directors will get their pay in worthless options going forward.
It's amazing how long this zombie company can stay on its feet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The recent story of their cessation to "compile" the history of the case seems a bit premature now.
That said, I'm beginning to wonder if Darl is playing "weekend at bernies" with the board of directors, because no sane board would authorize the liquidation of the bulk of a company's assets so an obsessed executive can go tilting at windmills.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They're finally owning up to what we've known all along: SCO's business is litigation. Server software? Pffft.
I love the fact that they're willing to sell the very products they're supposedly protecting from unauthorized use of "their" code, just to keep the legal fight going.
...that there will be a lot of "IANAL, but"'s comments on this story.
SCO wants to make darn sure that, at the end of the day, there is not a single penny left to pay Novell or IBM the money they will owe them.
I have a better idea. Wind up the corporation, sell all the assets.
A substantial number of us thought the bankruptcy trustee would put an end to SCO's shenanigans. Sadly, this hasn't turned out to be the case. The bankruptcy judge (Gross iirc) seems quite happy to see the SCO management running the company and continuing the abuse of the judicial system.
Orrin Hatch can spring John Forte who's serving 14 years in prison for having $1.4M worth of cocaine in a suitcase at an International Airport because "he's not an addict." There must be something in the water.
What company would want to adopt or standardize on a product developed by a company that is, for all intents and purposes, dead? Everyone has moved on, be it server side apps or embedded, there are ample companies that have a superior product with a healthy roadmap and no indication that they will not be around in 5 years.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
If he finds a buyer (or buyers) for the products that pay enough for those products then SCO gets a lot of money. Some of which could be direct towards himself and the other execs as bonuses or whatever.
Now, if you question whether he can find a buyer willing to pay that much for a dying product, just remember that he has found investors and partners before who seemingly pay millions of dollars for nothing.
Right now, his job is to drag this case out.
Darl has now gone from rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, to throwing them overboard...
Where is reads :
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company's efforts to market its products.
it should read :
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the efforts to market its products had been distracting to the company's main litigation activity
There, that's it.
Now a prediction. I predict that they are going to find a very generous buyer, that will pay much, much more than the market value of the actives, allowing the new, rather hollowed-out SCO to keep on litigating for years. Call it a hunch.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
McBride said in a letter to customers, partners and shareholders.
ie.
McBride said in a letter to his father-in-law, his wife and his mistress, and his grand parents.
@neonux
Have SCO stocks reached zero value yet?
Let's look at their IP most of which is centered around OpenServer and UnixWare, is anyone out there using those much anymore? Last time I checked we were all on any other Unix variant but those.
Other than IP we can look at their hard assets, I suppose they can just keep selling furniture and computers until it's just Darl working out of his garage again, but let's be real SCO doesn't have much left anywhere anyways...
...in bed
Seriously, does this not seem like Darl McBride is so obsessed with going after "the great white whale" that it's all he can think about, to the exclusion of everything else?
Where and when does it all end?
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
1. Sell off your (eventually) worthless core business
2. Continue paying yourself a huge salary
3. Lose the case, the company goes bankrupt. Core business loses all value.
4. Use your previous huge salary to retire
5. Everyone else gets nothing
Assets ????? - what assets. This is starting to become a really boring story. Maybe Darl can get a job flipping burgers and stop bothering the rest of us who are trying to create new technology!
And this time it'll be more than one step removed from the real source of the money.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
... of the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail.
"None shall pass!"
Have gnu, will travel.
There are times to publicly execute your legal council. This is one of those times.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
It sounds like they're going to sell their assets off to someone else, leaving SCO as just a shell from which to continue the lawsuits and hide away the assets from future claims against them.
The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products
SCO actually sells a product?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Ah but if the sale fails to raise sufficient cash the company directors will take a 10% cut in their salaries.
Is $280k a year a good salary for a CEO of a company that is in bankruptcy and has so far burned through $0.25B of investor capital.
Oh and there are only 66 employees. I would bet your nearest grocery store is larger than that.
I'm actually a little shocked that they haven't requested government financial assistance. It seems to be all the rage for companies with poor products, insane leadership, and failing business models.
mod this flamebait if you want, it's still true.
yeak, they are still not history?
Sure - it's a completely idiotic move, according to logic and ethics. But like watching a video of someone trying to badly imitate an episode of Jackass, there's just something odd about watching the single-minded drive towards something one knows is a stupid idea that oddly reinforces something about the human spirit.
Why? He knows he's marching towards a given horrible set of outcomes (damaging his own interests) - he knows he's mostly doing it to the entertainment of others - he even knows he's hurting those he works with (and seems to like that idea for some reason) - but through sheer will and bravado, he's picking up that damn skateboard, and he's going to jump all that freeway traffic, despite the fact that a little man just knocked his kneecap out of joint two minutes ago with a hammer.
Human drive can do so much - it can push us so far from reason that it can flip past tragedy back to comedy, even for 'successful' men like Darl. There's a twisted Catharsis in that - a fact about the human condition that we can use our focus towards any end, to just about any extent.
It reminds us why self-reflection, observing your own life from different perspectives occasionally can be so important too.
Ryan Fenton
As has been very evident, SCO has been stretching this case out as long as it possibly can. It is not interested particularly in winning, just in not losing finally. Frighten away corporations who potentially would use Linux but with the lawsuit have to declare the risk on their SEC 10C filing.
The only player I can see with the motivation to continue the FUD is Microsoft, but they are probably hanging back since they are still and adjudged monopolist, and could be very severely penalized for interfering with a competitor. But never fear, they have a cloud of dependant VAR they can "motivate" to support SCO with a high-price asset sale.
SCO has a market cap of just over $3 million. IIRC, McDonald's Corp is one of their major customers. That $3mil is pocket change for the $66.95 billion market cap McD's Corp.
What if McDonald's buys SCO? McD's could hire a couple devs (since that is all SCO needs, apparently..) for maintenance and some support personnel, then service their own stores as well as other existing customers. Maybe they'd wind up saving, if not making, some money in a few years. Perhaps give Darl a store to manage...
Heh. :)
Point being, with a market cap of only $3mil, SCO and anything they have/own are basically chump change for a real corporation. So, if the judges (have) let this happen, then, and I hate to even think of it, we'll see this zombie keep stumbling forward...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
... this can't be the real story, something else must be going on.
Stuff like this just doesn't happen.
It can't be all stupidity and ego, right? Something else is afoot.
Conspiracy theorists... where are you?
SCO proposal: split software business from litigation business.
BUT, doesn't the software side now owe Novell $2,547,817 as of July in unpaid royalties? Would not a suitor of the software business have to assume that liability (and any continuing appeals of that award)?
Didn't a court recently decide that SCO doesn't even own the copyright to UNIX? I mean, this case has always been ridiculous, but I'm confused as to how it's still running if SCO doesn't even own the copyright to the code that wasn't put Linux.
Why does the Open Group stand for this since they are the trademark owner of Unix and one of SCO's major claims is that they "own" the Unix business? Am I missing something fundamental here?
My Babylon
I wasn't aware that SCO did much outside of filing lawsuits. They have allowed their Unix product to atrophy, and their licensing service flopped. It's pretty apparent that SCO amounts to little more than a lawsuit factory.
The judge should find a way to dismiss the new case with prejudice so new cases can't be filed.
If they win, but there's no company left, what do they do then?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Imagine, a company selling off its primary assets to fund a shakedown lawsuit. If this is not proof that america is too litigious, what could be proof. This demonstrates just how sick this sue-for-profit legal system is. If sue-for-profit did not exist, SCO would be off trying make good products now and linux users would have never been intimidated. Sad sad day for our culture to see this continue yet again.
say what ? darl is making $300K/yr ... i'd like to see you make that much. how is it damaging his own interests ?
- Darl McBride's shirt ...?
- Millions in debt
-
. . . he'd probably try anything.
He'll have to stand in line behind the porn industry, of course.
Although, maybe he already got some money from the bank bailout pot. Who knows, since the banks aren't telling the government where it is being spent.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
To bad there is no UNIX IP in Linux.
The 2.0.36 version of the kernel had a bit of FreeBSD code in the network stack with the FreeBSD copyright removed and GPL copyright inserted.
And RedHat 5 had BSD lpd/lpr code. Without placing 'parts copywrite Berkley' in adverts.
So to say there is 'NO' UNIX IP in linux isn't quite right.
4 Billion (or whatever they were suing for) - I'll agree. But with the toxin of IP laws - to say there is no UNIX IP shows your lack of imagination.
Bernie Madoff allegedly stashing millions of dollars in checks in his desk (and who knows where he's stashed all sorts of $$$ in international accounts), getting ready to send it somewhere where the System can't touch it when all is said and done?
I would really argue that SCO Group should not be allowed to do this, as it is in essence allowing them to transfer assets out of the company so that they cannot be used to pay the company's legal obligations when all is said and done.
If you or I do it, say, to shelter/shed/disburse assets prior to a divorce settlement, bankruptcy or other judgment action (i.e., we attempt to shed assets after filing for bankruptcy), we get pilloried.
So that's why Darl and the other directors at the last board meeting kept saying, "Brains! brains! We need brains!"
Maybe they're hoping to get smart by eating brains.
Actually, unless he gets what he deserves and ends up with Bubba as a cellmate, I bet he and the other directors walk away with millions of dollars in their pockets.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You'd have to be an IT manager who had been living in an ice-cave w/o Internet connection for half a decade to actually want to support these ass-clowns.
... and if the person was serious he'd probably end up ostracized by everyone else at the company who can even spell "*nix".
Who is actually buying SCO products at this point? Is it just legacy customers who need ongoing support? Seriously, if a purchase-order to SCO crossed my desk I'd assume it was a practical joke
I mean, some companies are afraid to do anything the least bit controversial for fear of generating backlash from their would-be customers, and these guys go ahead and crap the bed in the middle of the entire industry -- yet they are still doing 8-figures a year in sales. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=scoxq.pk.
Who's buying their stuff?
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Darl doesn't have any illusions that SCO will win.
Darl and the SCOites are trying to prevent the few pieces of SCO's value (it's product lines) from falling into IBM and Novell's hands.
The idea is to leave SCO an empty shell so that its creditors end up with nothing.
SO, SCO wishes to give up any pretense of doing anything productive at all now or ever again so they can divy up the only remaining value amongst the lawyers and executives and have nothing left to pay their creditors. It sounds like they've also given up all but the slimmest pretense of even attempting to provide ROI for their stockholders.
For others unversed in US law,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_corporation
(appropriate captcha: surreal)
I'm one of the very few people on the planet who sides with SCO.
Perhaps IBM could buy them and write itself an unconditional irrevokable retroactive perpetual license to the products. And release them under GPLv3...
That would be terrible, least of all for IBM. Between IBM and Novell SCO is on the ropes and it should die. Actually I think an IBM buyout may of been in Darl McBride's and other's mind when they filed their lawsuit against IBM, hoping IBM would offer to buy SCO.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
But isn't the validity of those assets hinging on the outcome of the suit?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Thats corporate speak for "we're going to change the name of our stuff so SCO haters don't know they're buying SCO". This guy needs to go down in history appropriately for destroying SCO.
I'd really appreciate an ongoing list during this process so that we know what clever new names the software is marketed under so that we can all boycott anything software-formerly-known-as-SCO.
What, all the transcendental underpants?
SCO is not selling its main core business and people. The main core and people (that's: SCO) are separating themselves from the sinking ship of McBride and his obsessive lawsuit disorder.
That's the problem with leaders with a strong reality: When they're wrong, it takes a looong time for people to realize this and move away. And it takes an even longer time, for them to realize it themselves. This is, because such a strong self-induced confidence has the risk of becoming delusional.
A delusion can only exist for that long, if the person has built a very rigid and interconnected system of values, where everything depends on everything else. So he can't pull that one thing, without destroying everything else in the process, causing his whole reality to break down. A state that equivalent to death for the human mind.
Even followers can suffer from this effect.
McBride now has a strong neurosis, forcing him to go 'till the very end... unless someone offers him a way out, that lets him keep his reality. Or to be more exact: His self-acceptance of being good and right in what he does and did. It's either that, or a deathlike experience.
If anyone who knows him personally reads this: Give him that way out. Offer him a way, that lets him go up in self-respect when follows it. And you will see this whole obsession, all the lawsuits, and his whole way of acting go away in a blink of an eye. He will suddenly be Ok with saying that all what he did was not the best thing to do. But he will have a reason that this is Ok for him anyway.
By any means: Do not put more pressure upon him. He will only fight harder. Remember: His other choice is death(like). So he will oppose you up to that level. Ok... except if you're really evil and actually want that to happen. ;) But then, how would you still be better than him??
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Darl is going to make out just fine. Microsoft will underwrite his FUD campaign by paying multiple times the value of the assetts. The solution? LINUX Enthusiasts - Get together, and BUY SCO.
What assets? The chair and building?
SCO UNIX is obsolete. They cut development years ago to fuel this lawsuit.. (actually it might have been pretty stagnant before that but I'm not sure.) They just got thread support in 2005!
SCO UNIX has no advantage over other UNIXes other than simple inertia. People already using SCO didn't switch because they already were using it and there was no reason to switch.
SCO threatened and/or sued their remaining customers (to push them into paying that bogus Linux licensing fee). Oh those customers above who didn't switch? Well, actually some did.. after all, who would keep buying a product from a company who is threatening and sueing their own customers, when you were buying that product to begin with just due to simple inertia?
And has been shown in court, SCO doesn't have any "valuable IP" or whatever.
In conclusion, if SCO is selling assets to keep going, I conclude they will be selling the office furniture, they don't have anything else of value.
Aaaa Lawyers ... sure, sell off bits to stay in the pay. Then they can keep feeding on the carcass.
Where is the shareholder lawsuit? Lots of people were buying right after they announced the lawsuit -- the share price hit more than $20 a share. Shouldn't there be a bunch of pissed off people with pitchforks and torches?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Damaging his interests? It's in his interest to keep this zombie corp running as long as possible to keep collecting his salary.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
your placing of Groklaw into archival mode was maybe a bit premature.
The question here is whether or not the bankruptcy court will accept this proposal or simply force SCO into an involuntary Chapter 7 liquidation. BK courts do everything possible to make a potentially viable business emerge at the end of a Chapter 11 case, but if there's no viability the court can on its own motion or on the motion of creditors simply liquidate the whole thing.
SCO's lawyers include Darl's brother, Kevin. Turning SCO's assets into legal fees gets the money out of the company and into the family. At present SCO is dead in the water like a floating wreck. It still has some value on board. This strategy converts some of that into cash which can be trans-shipped into the family as legal fees.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Darl just issued a statement: Hey y'all, watch this!
These idiots are still around now that M$ isn't funding them and Novell is winning? What, exactly, is this CEO's reasoning?
What are they even suing over at this point? We've already established that Novell owns UNIX, so what else is there to sue over?
$ make available
What are the assets of SCO?
Well, at best a list of customers that have not found the time/money/energy to replace SCO Unix. Because, for years it is clear that maintaining it will be paid dearly because of all those external cost for a major law suite.
Now the company is unable to pay its debtors, so there is not capital that might go with the "assets" when sold. This means the new investor will milk the old customer base for ongoing support. SCO users beware.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
When was the last time you saw a real grill at McDonalds?
So your phrase should be "You have to work up to microwave".
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Is M$ still trying to restart this again?
I've got $5 on it!
Queue incoming litigation against Balmer for the concept of 'throwing chairs' in 3... 2... 1...
Queue? Are you putting the litigants in a line?
I think you mean "Cue".
He's dead
Everybody knows he's dead
But he fights on
Even though I profoundly despise everything about him, I ever so slightly admire his determination.
Or...is it just delusional fixation?
When you say POS do you mean Point-of-Sale, or a more vulgar but appropriate meaning?
'We believe there's value in these assets and in order for the business to move forward it's imperative we separate it from our legal claims and we allow our products business to move forward,'
Nobody wants to buy any of our stuff since we started trying to sue over other peoples work that we gave away.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Nobody's going to buy SCOX.pk. They would also be buying the liabilities in the IBM lawsuit, and probably the debt to Novell. Particular assets might be bought. But SCOX.pk doesn't seem to own very much of value to anyone. (I think their estimates of what the assets are worth is grossly inflated. If anyone pays that much it's probably worth investigating why.)
In particular, they can't transfer their ownership in rights to System V without Novell's consent. (And those rights are already very limited.) This basically means that they can't sell the right to sell working versions of the code that they've added to System V, as that requires the right to also sell System V which Novell has to approve the transfer of. (And which SCOX.pk is also likely to lose the right to. I'm sure this is sufficient grounds for Novell to cancel their agency agreement with SCOX.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well I never knew. I just thought they were patent trolls.
I don't particularly like some of the lawsuits I've seen myself but I would not change the system to make it harder to sue. I was involved in a civil lawsuit myself, as the plaintiff. I didn't hire the attorneys or file the lawsuit. I was in a coma when my family hired an attorney. See, as a college student after my classes one day I was hit by a moving van while riding my bike. Not counting the tyme I spent in therapy, I was in therapy for more than year when I had to quit because I couldn't afford it, my medical bills came to more than $120,000. Now if my family couldn't have filed the lawsuit we would have been stuck paying. And I now have a permanent disability, I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury or TBI. In college I was a Computer Engineering major but I can no longer do that, or pretty much any other type of fulltime employment. As the page linked to above says, "Memory mood and fatigue are common complaints of brain injury patients."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
It allows the parts of th companies actually producing something to be decoupled of the last attempts to somehow win some trial somewhere.
What Darl is doing makes perfect sense. First you must remember that scox was about to go belly-up before the scam. Scox has never been profitable. If not for the scam, scox would have been bankrupt years ago.
Thanks to all of that money from msft, Darl is taking in about $200K a year, and his brother is making even more. Not bad for small-time Utah scammers.
universal health care, you wouldn't have had to sue anyone.
The only people who won in your case are the lawyers on both sides.
You got shuffled around while the insurance tried to outlast you.
You're still around so you won a little, the insurance company just ratcheted up everybody else's coverage costs so everybody else lost.
But you're the one who's stuck with the infirmity. You have my heart felt sympathy.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Man, he must be Hitler's reincarnation here for its punishment, 'cause his karma's got to be worth as much as a Zimbabwean dollar.
Can you imagine being so morally and fiscally bankrupt that all you have to hang on to is a law suit that you have about as much chance of winning as you do of walking on the moon, by walking TO the moon.
That must really suck.
In fact I'd pay him off in Zimbabwean dollars, the only currency not even backed by its country's leader's gold fillings.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Of course Monty Python and the knight that loses all of it's limbs comes to mind as well.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The law is unjustly lenient in cases like this precisely because it is being abused by lawyers, and most laws are written by lawyers. I don't know anyone else who could write them, but it creates an inherent bias in favor of those acts that lawyers perform and others don't. And in favor of those acts that people who hire lawyers perform and others don't.
Lawyers will tend to work with other lawyers because they are both... lawyers. They are part of a guild, a professional brotherhood, united by common experience and training. Whether this is a bad thing is a matter of opinion, but it's a reality shared among lawyers, and any other professional group.
Think about it; when you start talking about firewalls, routing tables, and process management, are you going to consider the input of somebody who is clueless about such things over somebody who knows the difference between a default deny firewall and a NAT firewall?
And to every non-techie person who has to try to work with you, aren't you going to seem a bit, eh, elitist when you pay close attention to an arsehole who is speaking intelligently while ignoring the non-techies, who use words like "series of tubes" to describe technical details?
This isn't an issue with lawyers, it's an issue with all of mankind. Doctors listen to other doctors and ignore "lay folk". So do IT/techies, contractors, politicians, lawyers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, architects, scientists, and pilots. A techie thinks the technically insecure doctor is an idiot for not installing an anti-virus or doing backups. The doctor thinks an unhealthy techie is an idiot for not losing weight and quitting smoking.
Welcome to life, folks. You cast the shadow you leave behind. It's OK - it's just humanity, each making judgments according to their own experience!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
What are they smoking? I wanna get such shit.
=)
Isn't there some sort of responsibility to the shareholders and minimum due care in running a company. I mean we all know that it is a Microsoft funded whip to spread FUD against Linux rather than a real business, but surely they must be breaking some law.
I'm serious here, what assets do they have? They don't actually own the UNIX code as they claimed. Novell still holds ownership. So what do they have of value to actually sell? Or do they plan to sell stuff they don't actually own?
McBride - no one cares about your company and it's crap products. You LOST - ENOUGH ALREADY.
That would be $0xffffffff, and even $0xffffffffffffffff for the new 64-bit SCO. Enough to keep the frivolous lawsuits going for a while...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Maybe he should go to work for some other company where they hire executives with experience in throwing chairs...
The judge should throw the case out, and sentence Darl to pay all costs by doing what he could do best-- getting paid to be a crash test dummy.
Couldn't IBM make this problem go away, completely and forever, simply by buying these so-called products and then open sourcing them? Wouldn't that make SCO's claims all but pointless in anything but an academic setting?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What a tool.
Is this really still going on? - Jesus.. let it go already.