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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."
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
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!
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