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US Trustee Asks To Send SCO Into Chapter 7
Several readers including Pop69 inform us that the US Trustee's office has asked to convert SCO's Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7 — a.k.a. liquidation. Groklaw has the text of the filing: "...not only is there no reasonable chance of 'rehabilitation' in these cases, the Debtors have tried — and failed — to liquidate their business in chapter 11."
Yep. It'll be fascinating to see how O'Gara twists this into an SCO victory, and helps further their appeal.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Seriously. What assets do they have left that are worth selling? Patents? Software? I am sure there are still SCO shops around so there might be some interest in Unix Ware, Open Server etc. But how profitable will it be after everyone jumps the SCO ship to other platforms that aren't in danger of becoming unsupported?
All in all, good riddance.
Don't worry. The SCO execs still made their money and are most likely very comfortable. Shame they never got investigated for insider trading when they started dumping their own stock, while filing waves of lawsuits, or is that legal? IP was the last leg their company had to stand on, and that was a shaky one at best. It is kind of sad that it took them this long to finally burn through all their cash on lawyers. Couldn't they have just called it a day and given the money to charity or something or maybe tried to reinvest in a new venture? Clearly they didn't see any sort of long term future for SCO. Does any still even actively license their craptacular "Unix" from them?
zosxavius photography
One year, four months since I submitted this frontpaged Slashdot article about SCO being delisted from NASDAQ: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/27/1438204
I must ask again... is the wicked witch finally dead, YET?!
(Captcha: Circus. How. Very. Appropriate.)
Seriously. What assets do they have left that are worth selling? Patents? Software?
Well, sometimes you have to consider that the 'best' return on your investment is to 'render that horse' into dog food and glue. SCO has seemingly passed up both of those viable options in the hope of a MS type miracle, and failed.
Haul that dead horse to the rendering plant, and finally put it out of 'all of our miseries'!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Sure they were a respected UNIX vendor. They were the only serious choice at one time for Intel, and then they "owned" (sort of) the original UNIX rights. Doesn't mean they were the best or most wonderful or impressive vendor, but they were a serious vendor.
...and it had customers. Even if SCO's products and services were worthless, its customer base alone would still have been valuable enough for some other Unix vendor (say, HP) to buy it out.
Breakfast served all day!
Actually Canonical Close To $30M Critical Mass; Should Microsoft Worry? If anything, I'd say the spiral is going up, not down.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
There was a point in time when there was an SCO (probably prior to 7 buy outs and name transfers) that actually focused on technology. I remember when their product, in my opinion was the best UNIX desktop if for no other reason, but they had a control panel while everyone else still used configuration files. It was a dream being able to change screen resolution without having to restart X.
They also made some products in their Tarentella line which was a port of the Microsoft SMB stack and therefore was a MUCH MUCH better solution than the Samba of the time. In fact, management-wise, it might still be better. After all, when you can spend less time reverse engineering and hacking with compatibility problems you can spend more time on usability.
I guess that company is long gone and what's going bankrupt now is just some predators who attempted to capitalize off the accomplishments of the old SCO.
But Goodbye SCO. I miss you
While we've been worrying about a small company trying to make money by patent trolling large ones, the Masters of the Universe held whole governments to ransom. Bernie Madoff's petty cash fund is probably bigger than the entire SCO case.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm sorry, but the question was if anyone still actively goes and buys a license.
E.g., given the state of IP in Russia or China, I can't possibly imagine that the Bank Of Russia (or for that matter the China Post) actually bought full price licenses for those 22,000 branches. Most likely they had copied it lots, and if they even have a license in the meantime, they probably got some _massively_ discounted blanket license as most companies sell for Russia, China, etc. That or it was some scam in which it was imported through the CEO's brother's ghost company and it was just a way to siphon some money into their private pockets.
E.g., those BMW service centres or the Deutsche Bahn, I don't imagine they still pay anything for that SCO Unix or designing new systems around it. Most likely they still have some legacy stuff from the 80's or early 90's, and it stays there just because nobody can be arsed to replace it with something newer. Or maybe it's the same I'll get to for McDonald.
Running McDonald restaurants? Now that really gets me thinking. It's not like a McDonald restaurant has its own computing centre at all. If they're that big on SCO Unix, why only in restaurants? And why not in all restaurants? Does McDonald have anything against a homogenous and easy to administrate network?
What this last one gets me to suspect is that it's really more along the lines of "whatever embedded OS came with those cashier machines." Roll that around in your head a bit.
What that really tells me is that McDonald doesn't actually give a flying fuck about SCO Unix as such. They just have a bunch of cashier machines which incidentally came with SCO on them. But they wouldn't give a rat's arse about whether it's SCO or Linux or some embedded version of Windows or some refurbished thing based on OS/2, as long as it still talks the same protocols to the rest of their network.
And they probably won't shed one tear for SCO. Whoever manufactures those terminals will just switch to something else and McDonald won't even notice, nor care.
And it makes me wonder how many others on that list are essentially the same misleading claim. E.g., pharmacies? I don't imagine many either (A) actually implementing any meaningful computer centre in the back, or (B) actually choosing SCO for that. Most likely, again, it was whatever embedded crap came with their cashier machines. They'll keep them happily untilt they stop working at all, then replace them with some other machine that talks to the same protocol, and probably don't even know they run SCO at all.
Same for probably a lot of other retailers, since SCO seems to hype that.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't equal "actively licensing their craptacular Unix." In reality the only ones who actually actively licensed SCO there were the one or maybe two manufacturers of those cashier machines, and even those probably just because they got some old 16 bit version for peanuts.
And I'd be surprised if any of those would _still_ go and license SCO for a new machine, since the word "still" was in the GP's question too. Most likely it's something they licensed a decade or two ago, and never thought about it ever since.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
SCO had the lead in Unix on x86 hardware and apparently were used widely in certain sectors.
No, they most certainly did not.
Santa Cruz Operation had the lead in Unix on x86 hardware.
"The SCO Group", which is the company we're talking about, was a failed Linux vendor who called itself "SCO" after they decided to file baseless lawsuits.