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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Hrm..
Perhaps IBM could buy them and write itself an unconditional irrevokable retroactive perpetual license to the products. And release them under GPLv3...
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
That's one of the reasons so many companies incorporate in Delaware.
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.
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, 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.
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?
to say there is no UNIX IP shows your lack of imagination.
IP is not imaginary.
IP is the epitome of imaginary.
This is not my sandwich.
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.
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?
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.
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...
Oh, shut up, Darl.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
... I also fellate horses.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.